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The 


Dull Miss Archinard 


By 

Anne Douglas Sedgwick 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED. 


Copyright, 1898, by 
Charles Scribner’s Sons 
A ll rights reserved 


ar 


TO 

MY GRANDMOTHER 


a. A. S> 












I 


% 

% 



Prologue 
PETER ODD 









The Dull Miss Archinard 


CHAPTER I. 

P ETER ODD was fishing. He stood knee-deep 
in a placid bend of stream, whipping the water 
deftly, his eyes peacefully intent on the floating fly, 
his mind in the musing, impersonal mood of fisher- 
man reverie, no definite thought forming from the 
appreciative impressions of sunlit meadows, cool 
stretches of shade beneath old trees, gleaming 
curves of river. For a tired man, fishing is an 
occupation particularly soothing, and Peter Odd 
was tired, tired and sad. His pleasure was now, 
perhaps, more that of the lover of nature than of 
the true sportsman, the pastoral feast of the land- 
scape with its blue distance of wooded hill, more 
to him than the expected flashing leap of a scarlet- 
spotted beauty; yet the attitude of receptive in- 
tentness was pleasant in all its phases, no one 
weary thought could become dominant while the 
eyes rested on the water, or were raised to such 
loveliness of quiet English country. So much of 
what he saw his own too ; the sense of proprietor- 
ship is, under such circumstances, an intimately 
pleasant thing, and although, where Odd stood at 
a wide curve of water, a line of hedge and tall 
7 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


beech-trees sloping down to the river marked the 
confines of his property just here, the woods and 
meadows before him were all his — to the blue hills 
on the sky almost, the park behind him stretched 
widely about Allersley Manor, and to the left the 
river ran for a very respectable number of miles 
through woods and meadows as beautiful. The 
sense of proprietorship was still new enough to 
give a little thrill, for the old squire had died only 
two years before, and the sorrow of loss had only 
recently roused itself to the realization of bequeathed 
responsibilities, to the realization that energies so 
called forth may perhaps make of life a thing well 
worth living. A life of quiet utility ; to feel oneself 
of some earthly use; what more could one ask? 
The duties of a landowner in our strenuous days 
may well fill a man’s horizon, and Odd was well 
content that they should do so ; for the present at 
least ; and he did not look beyond the present. 

In his tweeds and waterproof knee-breeches and 
boots, a sun-burnt straw hat shading his thin 
brown face, his hand steady and dexterous, as 
brown and thin, he was a pleasing example of the 
English country-gentleman type. He was tall, with 
the flavor of easy strength and elegance that an 
athletic youth gives to the most awkwardly made 
man. His face was at once humorous and sad ; 
it is strange how a humorous character shows 
itself through the saddest set of feature. Odd’s 
long, rather acquiline nose and Vandyke beard 
made a decidedly melancholy silhouette on the 
sunlit water, yet all the lines of the face told of a 
kindly contemplation of the world’s pathetic follies ; 

8 


PETER ODD 


the mouth was sternly cut yet very good-tempered, 
and its firm line held evident suggestions of quiet 
smiling. 

Poor Peter Odd had himself committed a pathetic 
folly, and, as a result, smiles might be tinged with 
bitterness. 

A captured trout presently demanded concen- 
trated attention. The vigorous fish required long 
playing until worn out, when he was deftly secured 
in the landing-net and despatched with merciful 
promptitude ; indeed, a little look of nervous dis- 
taste might have roused in an unsympathetic looker- 
on conjectures as to a rather weak strain — a foolish 
width of pity in Peter Odd’s character. 

** A beauty,” he mentally ejaculated. He sat 
down in the shade. It was hot ; the long, thick 
grass invited a lolling rest. 

On the other side of the hedge was a rustic 
bathing-cabin, and from it Odd heard the laughing 
chatter of young voices. The adjoining property 
was a small one belonging to a Captain Archinard. 
Odd had seen little of him ; his wife was understood 
to be something of an invalid, and he had two girls 
— these their voices, no doubt. Odd took off his 
hat and mopped his forehead, looking at the little 
landing-wharf which he could just see beyond the 
hedge, and where one could moor boats or dive off 
into the deepness of the water. The latter form of 
aquatic exercise was probably about to take place, 
for Odd heard — 

“ I can swim beautifully already, papa,” in a con- 
fident young voice — a gay voice, quiet, and yet ex- 
cited too by the prospect of a display of prowess. 

9 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


A tall, thin girl of about fourteen stepped out on 
to the landing. A bathing-dress is not as a rule a 
very graceful thing, yet this child, her skirt to her 
knee, a black silk sash knotted around her waist, 
with her slim white legs and charming feet, was as 
graceful as a young Amazon on a Grecian frieze. 
A heavy mass of braids, coiled up to avoid a wetting, 
crowned her small head. She was not pretty ; Odd 
saw that immediately, even while admiring the 
well-poised figure, its gallantly held little torso and 
light energy. Her profile showed a short nose and 
prominent chin, inharmoniously accentuated. She 
seemed really ugly when her sister joined her ; the 
sister was beautiful. Odd roused himself a little 
from his half recumbency to look at the sister ap- 
preciatively. Her slimness was exaggerated to an 
extreme — an almost fluttering lightness ; her long 
arms and legs seemed to flash their whiteness on 
the green ; she had an exquisite profile, and her soft 
black hair swept up into the same coronet of coils. 
Captain Archinard joined them as they stood side 
by side. 

“You had better race,” he said, looking down into 
the water, and then away to the next band of shad- 
ow. “ Dive in, and race to that clump of aspens. 
This is a jolly bit for diving.” 

“ But, papa, we shall wet our hair fearfully,” said 
the elder girl — the ugly one — for so Odd already 
ungallantly designated her. “ We usually get in 
on this shallower side and swim off. We have never 
tried diving, for it takes so long to dry our hair. 
Taylor would not like it at all.” 

“ It is so deep, too,” said the beauty in rather 
10 


PETER ODD 


a faltering voice — unfortunately faltering, for her 
father turned sharply on her. 

“ Afraid, hey ? You must n’t be a coward, 
Hilda.” 

I am not afraid,” said the elder girl ; “ but I 
never tried it. What must I do? Put my arms 
so, and jump head first ? ” 

‘‘ There is nothing to do at all,” said the Captain, 
with some acidity of tone. “ Keep your mouth 
shut and strike out as you come up. You ’ll do it, 
Katherine, first try. Hilda is in a funk, I see.” 

“ Poor Hilda,” Odd ejaculated mentally. She 
was evidently in a funk. Standing on the edge of 
the landing, one slim foot advanced in a tentative 
effort, she looked down shrinking into the water — 
very deeply black at this spot — and then, half en- 
treatingly, half helplessly, at her father. 

Oh, papa, it is so deep,” she repeated. 

The Captain’s neatly made face showed signs of 
peevish irritation. 

** Well, deep or not, in you go. I must break 
you of that craven spirit. What are you afraid of? 
What could happen to you ? ” 

I — don’t like water over my head — might strike 
— on something.” 

Tears were near the surface. 

What asses people made of themselves, thought 
Odd, with their silly shows of authority. The more 
the father insisted, the more frightened the child 
became; couldn’t the idiot see that? The tear- 
filled eyes and looks that showed a struggle between 
fear of her father’s anger and fear of the deep, black 
pool, moved Odd to a sudden though half-amused 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


resentment, for the little girl was certainly some- 
what of a coward. 

“ Let me go in first, papa, and show her. Hilda, 
dear, it ’s nothing ; being frightened will make it 
something, though, so don’t be frightened, and watch 
me.” 

“Yes, go in first, Katherine; show her that I 
have a girl who is n’t a coward — and how one of my 
daughters came to be a coward I don’t understand. 
I am ashamed of you, Hilda.” 

Hilda evidently only controlled her sobs by a 
violent effort ; her caught-in under-lip, wide eyes, 
and heaving little chest affected Odd painfully. He 
frowned, sat up, put his hat on, and watched Miss 
Katherine with a lack of sympathy that was certainly 
unfair, for the plucky little person went through the 
performance most creditably, stretched out and up 
her thin pretty arms, curved forward her pretty 
body, and made the plunge with a lithe elegance 
that left her father gazing with complacent approval 
after the white flash of her feet. 

“Bravo! First-rate! There, Hilda, you see 
what can be done. Come on, little white feather.” 
He spoke more kindly ; the elder sister’s prowess put 
him more in humor with his less creditable offspring. 

“ Oh, papa ! ” The child shrank on the edge of 
the platform — she would go bundling in, and hurt 
herself. “ But, papa,” and her voice held a sharp 
accent of distress, “ where is Katherine ? ” 

Indeed Katherine had not reappeared. Only a 
moment had passed, but a moment under water is 
long. Captain Archinard’s eyes searched the sur- 
face of the river. 


12 


PETER ODD 


But she can swim ? ” 

Papa ! papa! She is drowned, drowned!"' 
Hilda’s voice rose to a scream. With a wild look 
of resolve she sprang into the river just as Odd 
dashed in, knee-deep, and as Katherine’s head ap- 
peared at some distance down the current — an angry 
little head, half choked, and gasping. Katherine 
swam and waded to the shore, falling on her knees 
upon the bank, while Odd dived into the hole — 
very bad hole, deep and weedy — after Hilda. 

He groped for the child among a tangle of roots, 
touched her hair, grasped her round the waist, and 
came to the surface with some difficulty, his strokes 
impeded by sinuous cord-like weeds. Captain Ar- 
chinard was too much astonished by the whole mat- 
ter to do more than exclaim, “ Upon my word ! ” 
as his younger daughter was deposited at his feet. 

** A nasty hole that. The weeds have probably 
grown since any one has dived.” 

Odd spoke shortly, having lost his breath, and 
severely ; the child looked half drowned, and Kathe- 
rine was still gasping. 

Why, Mr. Odd ! Upon my word ! ” — the Cap- 
tain recognized his neighbor — “ I don’t know how 
to thank you.” 

The Captain had not recovered from his astonish- 
ment, and repeated with some vehemence : Upon 
my word ! ” 

‘‘Well, papa, you nearly drowned me!” Kathe- 
rine was struggling between pride and anger. She 
would not let the tears come, but they were near 
the surface. “ Those horrible snaky things got hold 
of me and I almost screamed, only I remembered 

13 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 

that I mustn’t open my mouth, and I thought I 
would never come to the top.” The self-pitying re- 
trospect brought the tears to her eyes, but she held 
up her head and looked and spoke her resentment, 
“ I think you might have gone in first yourself. And 
Hilda ! Why did n’t you wait until I came to the 
surface before you made her do it ? ” 

Captain Archinard looked more vague under these 
reproaches than one would have expected after his 
exhibition of rather fretful autocracy. 

“ Made her ! ” he repeated, seizing with a rather 
mean haste at the error ; “ made her ? She went in 
herself! Like a rocket, after you. By Jove! she 
showed her blood after all.” 

Hilda ! you tried to save my life ! ” 

Odd still held the younger girl on his arm, sup- 
porting her while she choked and panted, for she 
had evidently had not shown her sister’s aplomb and 
had opened her mouth. Katherine took her into 
her arms and kissed her with a warmth quite dra- 
matic. 

Darling Hilda ! And you were so frightened, 
too. I would have gone in after her^' she added, 
looking up at Odd with a bright, quick glance, ‘‘ but 
there would have been nothing to my credit in 
that.” 

And I would have gone in after her, it goes 
without saying, Mr. Odd,” said the Captain, when 
Katherine had led away to the bathing-cabin her 
still dazed sister, but you seemed to drop from 
the clouds. Really, you have put me under a great 
obligation.” 

Not at all. I have spent most of the day in 

14 


PETER ODD 


the river. I merely went in a bit deeper to fish out 
that plucky little girl.” 

“ I Ve dived off that spot a hundred times. I ’d 
no idea there were weeds. I Ve never known weeds 
to be there. I '11 send down one of the men directly 
after lunch and have it seen to. Really I feel 
a sense of responsibility.” The Captain went on 
with an air of added self-justification, Though, of 
course, I ’m not responsible. I could n’t have known 
about the weeds.” 

Weeds or no weeds. Odd could not forgive him 
for the child’s fright, though he replied good-hu- 
moredly to the invitation to the house. 

Mrs. Archinard would have called on Mrs. Odd 
before this, but my wife is an invalid — never leaves 
the house or grounds. She sees a good deal of Miss 
Odd. I knew your father myself as well as one may 
know such a recluse ; spent some pleasant hours in 
his library — magnificent library you ’ve got. Pecul- 
iarly satisfactory it must be, as you go in for that 
sort of thing. Won’t you come in to tea this after- 
noon ? And Mrs. Odd ? Miss Odd ? I was sorry to 
find them out when I called the other day. I have n’t 
seen Mrs. Odd. I don’t see her at church.” 

“No; we have hardly settled down to our duties 
yet, and my wife only got back from the Riviera 
a few weeks ago.” 

“ Well, I hope we shall keep you at Allersley now 
that your wanderjahre are over, and that you 
are married. I was wandering myself during your 
boyhood. My brother bought the place, you know ; 
liked the country here immensely. Poor old Jack! 
Only lived ten years to enjoy it — and died a bach- 
15 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


elor — luckily for me. But we Ve missed one an- 
other, have n’t we? Neighbors too. I have seen 
Mrs. Odd — at a dance in London, Lady Bartle- 
bury’s, I remember ; and I remember that she was 
the prettiest girl in the room. Miss Castleton — the 
beautiful Alicia Castleton.” 

Miss Castleton’s fame had indeed been so wide 
that the title was quite public property, and the 
Captain’s reminiscent tone of admiration most nat- 
ural and allowable. Odd accepted the invitation to 
tea, waded back round the hedge, gathered up his 
basket and rod, and made his way up through the 
park to Allersley Manor. 

i6 


CHAPTER II 


M rs. odd and Miss Odd, Peter’s eldest and 
unmarried sister, were having an only half- 
veiled altercation when Odd, after putting on dry 
clothes, came into the morning-room just before 
lunch. Miss Odd sat by the open French window 
cutting the leaves of a review. There were several 
more reviews on the table beside her, and with her 
eyeglasses and fine, severe profile, she gave one the 
impression of a woman who would pass her morn- 
ings over reviews and disagree with most of them 
for reasons not frivolous. 

Mrs. Odd lay back in an easy-chair. She was 
very remarkable looking. The adjective is usually 
employed in a sense rather derogatory to beauty 
pure and simple, yet Mrs. Odd’s dominant charac- 
teristic was beauty, pure and simple ; beauty 
triumphantly certain of remark, and remarkable 
in the sense that no one could fail to notice 
her, as when one had noticed her it was impossible 
not to find her beautiful. It was not a loveliness 
that admitted of discussion. In desperate rebellion 
against an almost tame conformity, a rash person 
might assert that to him her type did not appeal ; 
but the type was resplendent. Perhaps too resplen- 
dent ; in this extreme lay the only hope of escape 
from conformity. The long figure in the uniform- 
2 17 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


like commonplace of blue serge and shirt-waist was 
almost too uncommonplace in elegance of outline ; 
the white hand too slender, too pink as to finger- 
tips and polished as to nails ; the delicate scarlet 
splendor of her mouth, the big wine-colored eyes, 
too dazzling. 

Mrs. Odd’s red-brown hair was a glory, a bur- 
nished, well-coiffed, well-brushed glory ; it rippled, 
coiled, and curved about her head. Her profile was 
bewildering — lazily, sweetly petulant. Is this the 
face ? ” a man might murmur on first seeing Alicia. 

Odd had so murmured when she had flashed upon 
his vision over a year ago. He was still young 
and literary, and, as he was swept out of himself, 
had still had time for a vague grasp at self-expres- 
sion. 

Mrs. Odd was speaking as he entered the room. 

‘‘ I don’t really see, Mary, what duty has got to 
do with it.” Without turning her head, she turned 
her eyes on Odd : “ How wet your hair is, Peter ! ” 

Mary Odd looked up from the review she was 
cutting rather grimly, and her cold face was irradi- 
ated with a sudden smile. 

Well, Peter,” she said quietly. 

“ I fished a little girl out of the river,” said Odd, 
taking a seat near Alicia, and smiling responsively 
at his sister. “ Captain Archinard’s little girl.” He 
told the story. 

An interesting contrast of physical and moral 
courage.” 

I have seen the children. They are noticeable 
children. They always ride to hounds.” Hunting 
had been Miss Odd’s favorite diversion during her 
l8 


PETER ODD 


father’s lifetime. ** But the pretty one, as I remem- 
ber, has not the pluck of her sister — physical, as you 
say, Peter, no doubt.” 

“ What sort of a person is Mrs. Archinard? ” 
Very pretty, very lazy, very selfish. She is an 
American, and was rich, I believe. Captain Archi- 
nard left the army when he married her, and imme- 
diately spent her money. Luckily for him poor 
Mr. Archinard died — Jack Archinard ; you remem- 
him, Peter ? A nice man. I go to see Mrs. Archi- 
nard now and then. I don’t care for her.” 

** You don’t care much for any one, Mary,” said 
Mrs. Odd, smiling. Your remarks on your Allers- 
ley neighbors are very pungent and very true, no 
doubt. People are so rarely perfect, and you only 
tolerate perfection.” 

^‘Yet I have many friends, Alicia.” 

“ Not near Allersley ? ” 

*‘Yes; I think I count Mrs. Hartley-Fox, Mrs. 
Maynard, Lady Mainwaring, and Miss Hibbard 
among my friends.” 

** Mrs. Maynard is the old lady with the caps, 
isn’t she? What big caps she does wear! Lady 
Mainwaring I remember in London, trying to marry 
off her eighth daughter. You told me, I recollect, 
that she was an inveterate matchmaker.” 

“ She has no selfish eagerness, if that is what you 
understood me to mean.” 

“ But she does interfere a great deal with the 
course of events, when events are marriageable 
young men, does n’t she? ” 

** Does she? ” 

** Well, you said she was a matchmaker, Mary, 

19 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


There was no disloyalty in saying so, for it is known 
by every one who knows Lady Mainwaring.” 

“ And, therefore, my friends are not, and need not 
be, perfect.” 

During this little conversation. Odd sat with the 
unhappy, helpless look men wear when their women- 
kind are engaged in such contests. 

I am awfully hungry. Is n’t it almost lunch- 
time?” he said, as they paused. 

Mrs. Odd looked at her watch. “ It only wants 
five minutes.” 

Odd walked to the window and looked out at the 
sweep of lawn, with its lime-trees and copper beeches. 
The flower-beds were in all their glory. 

“ How well the mignonette is getting on, Mary,” 
he said, looking down at the fragrant greenness that 
came to the window. Alicia got up and joined her 
husband, putting her arm through his. 

“ Let us take a turn in the garden, Peter,” she 
smiled at him ; and although he understood, with 
the fatal clearness that one year of life with Alicia 
had given him, that the walk was only proposed as 
a slight to Mary, he felt the old pleasure in her 
beauty — a rather sickly, pallid pleasure — and an 
inner qualm was dispersed by the realization that he 
and Mary understood one another so well that there 
need be no fear of hurting her. 

After one year of married life, he and Mary knew 
the nearness of the sympathy that allows itself no 
words. 

There seemed to Odd a perverse pathos in Ali- 
cia’s lonely complacency — a pathos emphasized by 
her indifferent unconsciousness. 


20 


PETER ODD 


** Mary is so disagreeable to-day,” said Alicia, as 
they walked slowly across the lawn. She has 
such a strong sense of her own worth and of other 
people’s worthlessness.” 

Odd made no reply. He never said a harsh word 
to his wife. He had chosen to marry her. The 
man who would wreak his own disillusion on the 
woman he had made his wife must, thought Odd, be 
a sorry wretch. He met the revealment of Alicia’s 
shallow selfishness with humorous gentleness. She 
had been shallow and selhsh when he had married 
her, and he had not found it out — had not cared to 
find it out. He contemplated these characteristics 
now with philosophic, even scientific charity. She 
was born so. 

“ It will be dull enough here, at all events,” Alicia 
went on, pressing her slim patent-leather shoe into 
the turf with lazy emphasis as she walked, for Alicia 
was not bad-tempered, and took things easily ; “ but 
if Mary is going to be disagreeable — ” 

“You know, Alicia, that Mary has always lived 
here. It is in a truer sense her home than mine, 
but she would go directly if either you or she found 
it disagreeable. Had you not assented so cordially 
she would never have stayed.” 

“ Don’t imply extravagant things, Peter. Who 
thinks of her going ? ” 

“ She would — if you made it disagreeable.” 

“ I ? I do nothing. Surely Mary won’t want to 
go because she scolds me.” 

“ Come, Ally, surely you don’t get scolded — more 
than is good for you.” Odd smiled down at her. 
Her burnished head was on a level with his eyes. 

21 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 

** Like everybody else, you are not perfection, and, 
as Mary is somewhat of a disciplinarian, you ought 
to take her lectures in a humble spirit, and be 
thankful. I do. Mary is so much nearer perfection 
than I am.” 

“ I am afraid I shall be bored here, Peter.” Alicia 
left the subject of Mary for a still more intimate 
grievance. 

“ The art of not being bored requires patience, 
not to say genius. It can be learned though. And 
there are worse things than being bored.” 

“ I think I could bear anything better.” 

“ What would you like. Ally ? ” Odd’s voice 
held a certain hopefulness. “ I ’ll do anything I 
can, you know. I believe in a woman’s individuality 
and all that. Does your life down here crush your 
individuality, Alicia ? ” 

Again Odd smiled down at her, conscious of an 
inward bitterness. 

“ Joke away, Peter. You know how much I care 
for all that woman business — rights and movements 
and individualities and all that ; a silly claiming of 
more duties that do no good when they ’re done. 
I am an absolutely banal person, Peter ; my mind 
to me is n’t a kingdom. I like outside things. I 
like gayety, change, diversion. I don’t like days 
one after the other — like sheep — and I don’t like 
sheep ! ” 

They had passed through the shrubbery, and 
before them were meadows dotted with the harm- 
less animals that had suggested Mrs. Odd’s 
simile. 

“ Well, we won’t look at the sheep. I own 
22 


PETER ODD 


that they savor strongly of bucolic immutability. 
You Ve had plenty of London for the past year, 
Ally, and Nice and Monte Carlo. The sheep are 
really the change.” 

“ You had better go in for a seat in Parliament, 
Peter.” 

“ Longings for a political salon. Ally ? I have 
hardly time for my scribbling and landlording as 
it is.” 

“A salon! Nothing would bore me so much as 
being clever and keeping it up. No, I like seeing 
people and being seen, and dancing and all that. I 
am absolutely banal, as I tell you.” 

“ Well, you shall have London next year. We ’ll 
go up for the season.” 

“You took me for what I was, Peter,” Mrs. Odd 
remarked as they retraced their steps towards the 
house. “ I have never pretended, have I ? You 
knew that I was a society beauty and that only. I 
am a very shallow person, I suppose, Peter ; I cer- 
tainly can’t pretend to have depths — even to give 
Mary satisfaction. It would be too uncomfortable. 
Why did you fall in love with me, Peter? It 
wasn’t en caract^re a bit, you know.” 

“ Oh yes, it was. Ally. I fell in love with you 
because you were beautiful. Why did you fall in 
love with me ? ” 

The mockery with which Alicia’s smile was 
tinged deepened into a good-humored laugh at her 
own expense. 

“ Well, Peter, I don’t think any one before made 
me feel that they thought me so beautiful. I am 
vain, you know. Your enthusiasm was awfully 

23 


THE DUEL' MISS ARCHINARD 


flattering. I am very sorry you idealized me, Peter. 
I am sure you idealized me. Shall we go in ? 
Lunch must be ready, and you must be hungrier 
than ever.” 

24 


CHAPTER III 


A t four that afternoon Odd, his wife, and Mary- 
started for the Archinards’ house. Mary had 
offered to join her brother; the prospect of the walk 
together was very pleasant. She could not object 
when Alicia, at the last moment, announced her in- 
tention of going too. 

“ I have never been to see her. I should like the 
walk, and Mary will approve of the fulfilment of my 
duty towards my neighbor.” 

Mary’s prospects were decidedly nipped in the 
bud, as Alicia perhaps intended that they should 
be ; but Alicia’s avowed motive was so praiseworthy 
that Mary allowed herself only an inner discontent, 
and, what with her good-humored demeanor. Odd’s 
placid chat of crops and tenantry, and Alicia’s ac- 
quiescent beauty, the trio seemed to enjoy the mile 
of beechwood and country road and the short sweep 
of prettily wooded drive that led to Allersley Priory, 
a square stone house covered with vines of magnolia 
and wisteria, and incorporating in its walls, accord- 
ing to tradition, portions of the old Priory which 
once occupied the site. From the back of the house 
sloped a wide expanse of lawn and shrubberies, and 
past it ran the river that half a mile further on flowed 
out of Captain Archinard’s little property into Odd’s. 

25 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


The drawing-room was on the groundfloor, and its 
windows opened on this view. 

Mrs. Archinard and the Captain were talking to 
young Lord Allan Hope, eldest son of Lord Main- 
waring. Mrs. Archinard’s invalidism was evidently 
not altogether fictitious. She had a look of at once 
extreme fragility and fading beauty. One knew 
at the first glance that she was a woman to have 
cushions behind her and her back to the light. 
There was no character in the delicate head, unless 
one can call a passive determination to do or feel 
nothing that required energy, character. 

The two little girls came in while Odd talked 
to their father. They were dressed alike in white 
muslins. Katherine’s gown reached her ankles ; 
Hilda’s was still at the mi-jambe stage. Their long 
hair fell about their faces in childlike fashion. Kath- 
erine’s was brown and strongly rippled ; Hilda’s 
softly, duskily, almost bluely black ; it grew in 
charming curves and eddies about her forehead, and 
framed her little face and long slim neck in straightly 
falling lines. 

Katherine gave Odd her hand with a little air that 
reminded him of a Velasquez Infanta holding out a 
flower. 

“You were splendid this morning, Mr. Odd. That 
hole was no joke, and Hilda swallowed lots of water 
as it was. She might easily have been drowned,” 

Katherine was certainly not pretty, but her deeply 
set black eyes had a dominant directness. She held 
her head up, and her smile was charming — a little 
girl’s smile, yet touched with the conscious power 
of a clever woman. Odd felt that the child was 
26 


PETER ODD 


clever, and that the woman would be cleverer. He 
felt, too, that the black eyes were lit with just a spice 
of fun as they looked into his as though she knew 
that he knew, and they both knew together, that 
Hilda had not been in much danger, and that his 
ducking had been only conventionally “ splendid.” 

“ Hilda wants to thank you herself, don’t you, 
Hilda? She had such a horrid time altogether ; you 
were a sort of Perseus to her, and papa the sea mon- 
ster ! ” Then Katherine, having, as it were, intro- 
duced and paved the way for her sister, went back 
across the room again, and stood by young Allan 
Hope while he talked to the beautiful Mrs. Odd. 

Hilda seemed really in no need of an introduction. 
She was not shy, though she evidently had not her 
sister’s ready mastery of what to say, and how to 
say it. Odd was rather glad of this ; he had found 
Katherine’s aplomb almost disconcerting. 

“ I do thank you very much.” She put her hand 
into Odd’s as he spoke, and left it there ; the con- 
fiding little action emphasized her childlikeness. 

“ What did you think of as you went down ? ” he 
asked her. 

In the river?” A shade of retrospective terror 
crossed her face. 

“ No, no ! we won’t talk about the river, will we ? ” 
Odd said quickly. However funny Katherine’s 
greater common sense had found the incident, it had 
not been funny to Hilda. Have you lived here 
long ? ” he asked. Captain Archinard had joined 
Mrs. Odd, and with an admirer on either side, Alicia 
was enjoying herself. “ I have never seen you be- 
fore, you know.” 


27 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


We have lived here since my uncle died ; about 
eight years ago, I think.” 

“Yes, just about the time that I left Allersley.” 

“ Did n’t you like Allersley ? ” Hilda asked, with 
some wonder. 

“ Oh, very much ; and my father was here, so I 
often came back ; but I lived in London and Paris, 
where I could work at things that interested me.” 

“ I have been twice in London ; I went to the 
National Gallery.” 

“ You liked that ? ” 

“ Oh, very much.” She was a quiet little girl, 
and spoke quietly, her wide gentle gaze on Odd. 

“ And what else did you like in London ? 

Hilda smiled a little, as if conscious that she was 
being put through the proper routine of questions, 
but a trustful smile, quite willing to give all infor- 
mation asked for. 

“ The Three Fates.” 

“You mean the Elgin Marbles?” 

“ Yes, with no heads ; but one is rather glad they 
have n’t.” 

“ Why? ” asked Odd, as she paused. Hilda did 
not seem sure of her own reason. 

“ Perhaps they would be too beautiful with heads,” 
she suggested. “ Do you like dogs?” she added, 
suddenly turning the tables on him. 

“Yes, I love dogs,” Odd replied, with sincere 
enthusiasm. 

“ Three of our dogs are out there on the verandah, 
if you would care to know them ? ” 

“ I should very much. Perhaps you ’ll show me 
the garden too ; it looks very jolly.” 

28 


PETER ODD 


It was a pleasure to look at his extraordinarily 
pretty little Andromeda, and he was quite willing 
to spend the rest of his visit with her. They went 
out on the verandah, where, in the awning’s shade, 
lay two very nice fox terriers. A dachshund sat 
gazing out upon the sunlit lawn in a dog’s dignified 
reverie. 

‘‘ Jack and Vic,” Hilda said, pointing out the two 
fox terriers. “ They just belong to the whole family, 
you know. And this dear old fellow is Palamon ; 
Arcite is somewhere about ; they are mine.” 

“ Who named yours ? ” 

I did — after I read it ; they had other names 
when they were given to me, but as I had never 
called them by them, I thought I had a right to 
change them. I wanted names with associations, 
like Katherine’s setters ; they are called Darwin and 
Spencer, because Katherine is very fond of science.” 

Oh, is she ? ” said Odd, rather stupefied. You 
seem to have a great many dogs in couples.” 

“ The others are not ; they are more general dogs, 
like Jack and Vic.” 

Hilda still held Odd’s hand : she stooped to stroke 
Arcite’s pensive head, giving the fox terriers a pat 
as they passed them. 

“ So you are fond of Chaucer ? ” Odd said. They 
crossed the gravel path and stepped on the lawn. 

“Yes, indeed, he is my favorite poet. I have not 
read all, you know, but especially the Knight’s Tale.” 

“ That’s your favorite ? ” 

“Yes.” 

“ And what is your favorite part of the Knight’s 
Tale ? ” 


29 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“ The part where Arcite dies.” 

‘‘ You like that? ” 

“ Oh ! so much ; don’t you ? ” 

“ Very much ; as much, perhaps, as anything 
ever written. There never was a more perfect 
piece of pathos. Perhaps you remember it.” He 
was rather curious to know how deep was this love 
for Chaucer. 

I learnt it by heart ; I have n’t a good memory, 
but I liked it so much.” 

** Perhaps you would say it to me.” 

Hilda looked up a little shyly. 

** Oh, I can’t ! ” she exclaimed timidly. 

“ Can't you ? ” and Odd looked down at her a 
humorously pleading interrogation. 

I can’t say things well ; and it is too sad to say 
— one can just bear to read it.” 

Just bear to say it — this once,” Odd entreated. 
They had reached the edge of the lawn, and stood 
on the grassy brink of the river. Hilda looked down 
into the clear running of the water. 

Is n’t it pretty ? I don’t like deep water, where 
one can’t see the bottom ; here the grasses and the 
pebbles are as distinct as possible, and the minnows 
— don’t you like to see them ? ” 

‘‘ Yes, but Arcite. Don’t make me tease you.” 
Hilda evidently determined not to play the coward 
a second time. The quiet pressure of Odd’s hand 
was encouraging, and in a gentle, monotonous little 
voice that, with the soft breeze, the quickly running 
sunlit river, went into Odd’s consciousness as a 
quaint, ineffaceable impression of sweetness and sad- 
ness, she recited : — 


30 


PETER ODD 


** Allas the wo ! alias the peynes stronge, 

That I for you have suffered, and so longe I 
Allas the deth 1 alias myn Emelye ! 

Allas departing of our companye 1 
Allas myn hertes quene ! alias, my wyf ! 

Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf I 

What is this world ? What asketh man to have ? 

Now with his love, now in his colde grave 
Allone, withouten any companye.” 

Odd’s artistic sensibilities were very keen. He 
felt that painfully delicious constriction of the throat 
that the beautiful in art can give, especially the 
beautiful in tragic art. The far-away tale ; the far- 
away tongue ; the nearness of the pathos, poignant 
in its white simplicity.” And how well the monot- 
onous little voice suited its melancholy. 

“ Allone, withouten any companye,” 

he repeated. He looked down at Hilda ; he had 
tactfully avoided looking at her while she spoke, fear- 
ing to embarrass her; her eyes were full of tears. 

** Thanks, Hilda,” he said. It struck him that 
this highly strung little girl had best not be allowed 
to dwell too long on Arcite and, after a sympathetic 
pause (Odd was a very sympathetic person), he 
added : 

** Now are you going to take me into the garden ? ” 

“Yes.” Hilda turned from the river. “You 
know he had just gained her, that made it all the 
worse. If he had not loved her he would not have 
minded dying so much, and being alone. One can 
hardly bear it,” Hilda repeated. 

“ It is intensely sad. I don’t think you ought to 
have learned it by heart, Hilda. That ’s ungrateful 

31 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


of me, is n’t it ? But I am old enough to take an 
impersonal pleasure in sad things ; I am afraid they 
make you sad.” 

Hilda’s half-wondering smile was reassuringly 
childlike. 

“ Oh, but it ’s nice being sad like that.” 

Odd reflected, as they went into the garden, that 
she had put herself into his category. 

After the shadow of the shrubberies through which 
they passed, the fragrant sunlight was dazzling. 
Rows of sweet peas, their mauves and pinks and 
whites like exquisite musical motives, ran across the 
delicious old garden. A border of deep purple pan- 
sies struck a beautifully meditative chord. Flowers 
always affected Odd musically ; he half closed his 
eyes to look at the sweeps of sun-flooded color. A 
medley of Schumann and Beethoven sang through 
his head as he glanced down, smiling at Hilda Ar- 
chinard ; her gently responsive little smile was fun- 
nily comprehensive ; one might imagine that tunes 
were going through her head too. 

Is n’t it jolly, Hilda ? ” 

^‘Very jolly,” she laughed, and, as they walked 
between the pansy borders she kept her gentle smile 
and her gentle stare up at his appreciative face. 

She thought his smile so nice ; his teeth, which 
crowded forward a little, lent it perhaps its peculiar 
sweetness ; his eyelids, drooping at the outer corners, 
gave the curious look of humorous sadness to the 
expression of his brown eyes. His moustache was 
cut shortly on his upper lip, and showed the rather 
quizzical line of his mouth. Hilda, unconsciously, 
enumerated this catalogue of impressions. 

32 


PETER ODD 


What fine strawberries,” said Odd. I like the 
fragrance almost more than the flavor.” 

‘‘But won’t you taste them?” Hilda dropped 
his hand to skip lightly into the strawberry bed. 
“ They are ripe, lots of them,” she announced, and 
she came running back, her outstretched hands full 
of the summer fruit, red, but for the tips, still un- 
tinted. The sunlit white frock, the long curves of 
black hair, the white face, slim black legs, and the 
spots of crimson color made a picture — a sunshiny 
Whistler. 

Odd accepted the strawberries gratefully ; they 
were very fine. 

“I don’t think you can have them better at 
Allersley Manor,” said Hilda, smiling. 

“ I don’t think mine are as good. Won’t you 
come some day to Allersley Manor and compare ? ” 

“ I should like to very much.” 

“ Then you and Miss Katherine shall be formally 
invited to tea, with the understanding that after- 
wards the strawberry beds are to be invaded.” 

“ I should like to very much,” Hilda repeated. 

“ Hullo ! Don’t make me feel a pig ! Eat some 
yourself,” said Odd, who had finished one handful. 

“ No, no, I picked them for you.” 

Odd took her disengaged hand in his as they 
walked on again, Hilda resisting at first. 

“ It is so sticky.” 

“ I don’t mind that : it is very generous.” She 
laughed at the extravagance. 

“ And what do you do all day besides swimming ? ” 
Odd asked. 

“ We have lessons with our governess. She is 

3 33 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


strict, but a splendid teacher. Katherine is quite a 
first-rate Latin scholar.” 

“ Is Katherine fond of Chaucer? ” 

Katherine cares more for science and — and 
philosophy.” Hilda spoke with a respectful gravity. 
“That’s why she called her dogs Darwin and 
Spencer. She has n’t read any of Spencer yet, but 
of course he is a great philosopher. She knows that, 
and she has read a good deal of a big book by Dar- 
win, ‘ The Origin of Species,’ you know.” 

“ Yes, I know.” Odd found Katherine even more 
startling than her sister. 

“ I tried to read it, but it was so confusing — 
about selection and cabbages — I don’t see how 
cabbages can select, do you ? ” Hilda’s voice held 
a reminiscent vagueness. “ Katherine says that she 
did not care for it much^ but she thought she ought 
to look through it if she wanted a foundation ; she 
is very keen on foundations, and she says Darwin is 
the foundation-key — or corner-stone — no, keystone 
to the arch of modern science — at least she did not 
say so, but she read me that from her journal.” 

“ Oh ! Katherine wrote that, did she ? ” 

“ Yes ; but you must n’t think that Katherine is a 
blue-stocking.” Something in Odd’s tone made 
Hilda fear misunderstanding. “ She loves sports of 
all kinds, and fun. She goes across country as well 
as any woman — that is what Lord Mainwaring said 
of her last winter during fox-hunting. She is n*t 
afraid of anything.” 

“ And what else do you do besides lessons ? ” 

“Well, I read and walk; there are such famous 
walks all about here, walks in woods and on hills. 
34 


PETER ODD 


I don’t care for roads, do you ? And I stay with 
mamma and read to her when she is tired.” 

And Katherine ? ” 

‘‘She is more with papa.” In her heart Hilda 
said : “ He loves her best,” but of that she could not 
speak, even to this new friend who seemed already 
so near ; to no one could she hint of that ache in 
her heart of which jealousy formed no part, for it 
was natural that papa should love Katherine best, 
that every one should ; she was so gay and cour- 
ageous ; but though it was natural that Katherine 
should be loved best, it was hard to be loved least. 

“You are by yourself a good deal, then?” said 
Odd. “ Do you walk by yourself, too ? ” 

“Yes, with the dogs. I used to have grand- 
mamma, you know ; she died a year ago.” 

“ Oh, yes ! Mrs. Archinard’s mother.” 

Hilda nodded ; her grasp on Odd’s hand tightened 
and they walked in silence. Odd remembered the 
fine portrait of a lady in the drawing-room ; he had 
noticed its likeness and unlikeness to Mrs. Archi- 
nard ; a delicate face, but with an Emersonian ex- 
pression of self-reliance, a puritan look of stanch- 
ness and responsibility. 


35 


CHAPTER IV 


O N the way home, cool evening shadows slant- 
ing across the road, Alicia declared that she 
had really enjoyed herself. 

‘‘ Captain Archinard is quite jolly. He has seen 
everybody and everything under the sun. He is 
most entertaining, and Lord Allan is remarkably 
uncallow.” 

He thinks of standing for Parliament next year. 
A nice, steady, honest young fellow. How do you 
like the Archinards, Peter?” 

“ The child — Hilda — is a dear child.” 

She is awfully pretty,” said Alicia, who could 
afford to be generous; “ I like that colorless type.” 
“ She is delicate, I am afraid,” said Mary. 

“ She has the mouth of a Botticelli Madonna and 
the eyes of a Gainsborough ; you know the portrait 
of Sheridan’s wife at Dulwich? ” 

Alicia had never been to Dulwich. Mary assented. 
The other one — the ugly one — is very clever,” 
Alicia went on ; she was in a good temper evidently. 
Not that Alicia was ever exactly bad-tempered. 
“ She said some very clever things and looked 
more.” 

She is too clever perhaps,” Mary remarked. 
“ As for Mrs. Archinard, I should like to slap her. 
I think that my conventionality is of a tolerant 

36 


PETER ODD 


order, but Mrs. Archinard’s efforts at aesthetic orig- 
inality make me feel grimly conventional.” 

“ Mary ! Mary ! how delightful to hear such un- 
charitable remarks from you. /should rather like 
to slap her too, though she struck me as awfully 
conventional.” 

“ Oh, she is, practically. It is the artistic argot 
that bores one so much.” 

“ She is awfully self-satisfied too. Dear me, 
Peter, I wish we had driven after all. I hate the 
next half-mile. It is just uphill enough to be irri- 
tating — fatigue without realizing exactly the cause 
of it. Why didn’t we drive, Peter? ” 

“ I thought we all preferred walking. You are a 
very energetic young person as a rule.” 

“ Not for tiresome country roads. They should 
be got over as quickly as possible.” 

“ Well, we will cut through the beech-woods as 
we came.” 

“ Oh dear,” Alicia yawned, how tired I am 
already of those tiresome beech-woods. I wish it 
were autumn and that the hunting had begun. 
Captain Archinard gives me glowing accounts, and 
promises me a lead for the first good run. We must 
fill the house with people then, Peter.” 

“ The house shall be filled to overflowing. Per- 
haps you would like some one now. Mrs. Laughton 
and her girls ; you like them, don’t you ? ” 

Alicia wrinkled up her charming nose. 

“ Can’t say I do. I ’ve stopped with them too 
much perhaps. They bore me. I am afraid no one 
would come just now, everything is so gay in 
London. I wish I were there.” 

37 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


Alicia was not there because the doctor had 
strongly advised country air and the simple inaction 
of country life. Alicia had lost her baby only three 
weeks after its birth — two months ago — and had 
herself been very ill. 

“ But I think I shall write to some people and ask 
them to take pity on me/’ she added, as they 
walked slowly through the woods. “ Sir John, and 
Mr. and Mrs. Damian, Gladys le Breton, and Lord 
Calverly.” 

Well ! ” Peter spoke in his usual tone of easy 
acquiescence. 

Mary walked on a little ahead. What good did 
it do to trouble her brother uselessly by her im- 
patient look? But how could Peter yield so 
placidly ? Mary respected him too much to allow 
herself an evil thought of his wife ; but Alicia was 
a person to be talked about. Mary did not doubt 
that she had been talked about already, and would 
be more so if she were not careful. 

Lord Calverly and Sir John dangling attendance 
would infallibly cause comment on any woman — 
let alone the beautiful Mrs. Odd. Yet Peter said, 
“ Well ! ” 


38 


CHAPTER V 


T he evening did not pass pleasantly at the 
Priory. Captain Archinard’s jolliness did not 
extend to family relationships ; he often found 
family relationships a bore, and the contrasted 
stodginess of his own surroundings seemed greater 
after Mrs. Odd’s departure. 

He muttered and fumed about the drawing-room 
after dinner. 

He was confoundedly pinched for money, and 
upon his word he would not be surprised if he 
should have to sell the horses. *‘And what my 
life will be stuck down here without the hunting, I 
can’t imagine. Damnable ! ” 

The Captain growled out the last word under his 
breath in consideration of Katherine and Hilda, 
who had joined their father and mother after their 
own tea and a game of lawn-tennis. But Mrs. 
Archinard was not the woman to allow to pass un- 
noticed such a well-founded cause of grievance. 

With a look of delicate disgust she laid down the 
volume of Turgenieff that she was reading. 

“ Shall I send the children away, Charles ? Either 
they or you had best go, if you are going to talk 
like that.” 

“ Beg pardon,” said the Captain shortly. “ No, 
of course they don’t go.” 

“ I am sure I have few enough enjoyments with- 

39 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


out being made to suffer because you are to lose 
one of yours.” 

“ Who asks you to suffer, Kate ? But you don’t 
wait for the asking. You ’re only too willing to offer 
yourself as a souffre-douleur on all occasions.” 

Then Mrs. Archinard retired behind her book in 
scornful resignation and, after twenty minutes of 
silence, the little girls were very glad to get away 
to bed. 

Hilda was just undressed when Mrs. Archinard 
sent for her to come to her room. Her head ached, 
and Hilda must brush her hair ; it was early yet. 
This was a customary task, and one that Hilda 
prided herself upon accomplishing with sovereign 
beneficence. Taylor’s touch irritated Mrs. Archi- 
nard ; Hilda only was soothing. 

In dressing-gown and slippers she ran to her 
mother’s room. 

Mrs. Archinard’s long hair — as black and as fine 
as Hilda’s — fell over the back of the large arm-chair 
in which she reclined. 

“Such a headache !” she sighed, as Hilda took 
up the brush and began to pass it slowly and gently 
down the length of hair. “ It is really brutal of your 
father to forget my head as he does.” 

Hilda’s heart sank. The unideal attitude of her 
father and mother toward one another was one of 
her great sorrows. Papa was certainly fond of his 
pretty wife, but he was so fretful and impatient, and 
mamma so continually grieved. It was all wrong. 
Hilda had already begun to pass judgment, uncon- 
sciously, on her father ; but her almost maternal 
tenderness for her mother as yet knew no doubt. 

40 


PETER ODD 


It would be very dreadful if the horses had to 
go, would n’t it ? ” she said. Her father’s bad temper 
might be touching if its cause were suggested. 

“ Of course it would ; and so are most things 
dreadful. I am sure that life is nothing but dread- 
fulness in every form.” Yet Mrs. Archinard was 
not at all an unhappy woman. Her life was deli- 
cately epicurean. She had few wants, but those 
few were never thwarted. From the early cup of 
exquisite tea brought to her bedside, through all 
the day of dilettante lounging over a clever book — 
a day relieved from monotony by pleasant episodes 
— dainty dishes especially prepared, visits from ac- 
quaintances, with whom she had a reputation for 
languid cynicism and quite awesome literary and 
artistic cleverness — to this hour of hair-brushing, 
few of her moments were not consciously apprecia- 
tive of the most finely flavored mental and physical 
enjoyment. But the causes for enjoyment certainly 
seemed so slight that Mrs. Archinard’s graceful 
pessimism usually met with universal sympathy. 
Hilda was very sorry for her mother. To lie all 
day reading dreary books ; condemned to an in- 
action that cut her off from all the delights of out- 
door life, seemed to her tragic. Mrs. Archinard did 
not undeceive her; indeed, perhaps, the most fasci- 
nating of Mrs. Archinard’s artistic occupations was 
to fancy herself very tragic. Hilda went back to 
her room much depressed. 

The girls slept together, and Katherine was sitting 
up in her night-gown writing her journal by candle- 
light and enjoying a sense of talent flowing at all 
costs — for writing by candlelight was strictly for- 
41 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


bidden — as she dotted down what she felt to be a 
very original and pungent account of the day and 
the people it had introduced. 

When, however, she heard the patter of Hilda’s 
heedless slippers in the corridor, she blew out the 
candle in a hurry, pinched the glowing wick, and 
skipped into bed. She might take an artistic 
pleasure in braving rules, but Katherine knew that 
Hilda would have shown an almost dull amazement 
at her occupation ; and although Katherine charac- 
terized it as dull, she did not care to arouse it. She 
wished to stand well in Hilda’s eyes in all things. 
Hilda must find nothing to criticise in her either 
mentally or morally. 

“ What shall we do if the horses are sold ? ” she 
exclaimed, as Hilda got into the little bed beside 
hers. Only imagine ! no hunting next winter ! at 
least, none for us ! ” 

Poor papa,” Hilda sighed. 

“ Oh, you may be sure that he will keep one 
hunter at least, but of course he will be dreadfully 
cut off from it with only one, and of course our 
horses will have to go if the worst comes to the 
worst. You won’t miss it as much as I will, Hilda ; 
the riding, yes, no doubt, but not the hunting. Still 
Lord Mainwaring will give us a mount, and now 
that Mr. Odd is here, he will be sure to have a lot 
of horses. The old squire let everything of that 
sort run down so. Miss Odd had only two hunt- 
ers. Well, Hilda, and what do you think of Mr. 
Odd ? ” 

Oh, I love him, Katherine ! ” Hilda lay looking 
with wide eyes into the soft darkness of the room. 

42 


PETER ODD 


The windows were open, and the drawn chintz cur- 
tains flapped gently against the sills. 

** I would n’t say that if I were you, Hilda,” 
Katherine remarked, with some disapproval. 

“ Why not ? ” Hilda’s voice held an alarmed note. 
Katherine was, to a great extent, her mentor. 

“ It does n’t sound very — dignified. Of course 
you are only a little girl, but still — one does n’t say 
such things.” 

“ But I do love him ; how can one help loving a 
person who treats one so kindly. And then — any- 
way — even if he had not been kind to me I should 
love him, I think.” 

Hilda would have liked to be able properly to 
analyze her sensations and win her sister’s approval ; 
but how explain clearly ? 

“ That would be rather foolish,” Katherine said, 
in a tone of kind but restraining wisdom ; “ one 
should n’t let one’s feelings run away with one like 
that. Shall I tell you what / think about Mr. Odd ? ” 
Oh yes, please.” 

I think he is like the river where we jumped in 
to-day — ripples on the top, kindness and smiles, 
you know — but somewhere in his heart a big hole 
— a hole with stones and weeds in it.” Katherine 
was quoting from her journal, but Hilda might as 
well think the simile improvised : Katherine felt 
some pride in it ; it certainly justified, she thought, 
the conventionally illicit act of the candle. 

Hilda lay in silent admiration. 

“ Oh, Katherine, I never know how I feel things 
till you tell me like that,” she said at last. “ How 
beautiful ! Yes, I am sure he has a hole in his 
43 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


heart.” And tears came into Hilda’s eyes and into 
her mind the line : — 

“ Allone, withouten any companye.” 

“ As for Mrs. Odd,” Katherine continued, pleased 
with the success of her psychology, “ she has no 
heart to make a hole in.” 

“ Katherine, do you think so? How dreadful ! ” 

“ She is a thorough egotist. She does n’t know 
much either, Hilda, for when Darwin came in she 
laughed a lot at the name and said she would n’t be 
paid to read him — the real Darwin.” 

Perhaps she likes other things best.” 

Herself,” said Katherine decisively. “ Miss Odd 
of course we have had time to make up our minds 
about.” 

“ I like her ; don’t you ? She has such a clear, 
trustful face.” 

“ She is rather rigid ; about as hard on other peo- 
ple as she would be on herself. She could never 
do anything wrong.” 

I don’t quite like that; being hard on other 
people, I mean. One could be quite sure about one’s 
own wrongness, but how can one about other peo- 
ple’s ? It is rather uncharitable, is n’t it, Katherine ? ” 

She is n’t very charitable, but she is very just. 
As for Lord Allan, he is a sort of type, and, there- 
fore, not very entertaining.” 

A type of what ? ” 

“ Oh, just the eldest son type ; very handsome, 
very honest, very good, with a strong sense of re- 
sponsibility. Jimmy Hope is just like him, which 
is a great pity, as one expects a difference in the 
younger son — more interest.” 

44 


PETER ODD 


Katherine went to sleep with a warmly comfort- 
able sense of competence. She doubted whether 
many people saw things as clearly as she did. 

She was wakened by an unpleasant dreaming 
scream from Hilda. 

“ What is the matter, Hilda ? ” She spoke crossly. 
“ How you startled me.’' 

“ Oh, such a horrid dream ! ” Hilda half sobbed. 
“ How glad I am that it is n’t so ! ” 

“ What was it ? ” Katherine asked, still crossly ; 
severity she thought the best attitude towards 
Hilda’s fright. 

“ About the river, down in the hole ; I was chok- 
ing, and my legs and arms were all tangled in roots.” 

‘‘ Well, go to sleep now,” Katherine advised. 

Hilda was obediently silent, but presently a small, 
supplicating voice was heard. 

Katherine — I ’m so sorry — don’t be angry — 
might I come to you ? I ’m so frightened.” 

“ Come along,” said Katherine, still severely, but 
she put her arms very fondly around her shivering 
sister, snuggled her consolingly and kissed her. 

‘‘ Silly little Hilda,” she said. 

45 


CHAPTER VI 


T hree days before the arrival of Gladys le Bre- 
ton, Mrs. Marchant, Lord Calverly, and Sir 
John (the Damians only did not accept Alicia’s in- 
vitation), Mary Odd astonished her brother. 

She came into the library early one morning be- 
fore breakfast. Odd was there, writing. 

Peter,” she said, last night, before going to 
bed, I wrote to Mr. Apswith and accepted him.” 

Mary always spoke to the point. Peter wheeled 
round his chair in amazement. 

Accepted Mr. Apswith, Mary ? ” 

“Yes. I always intended to at some time, and I 
felt that the time had come.” 

Mr. Apswith, a clever, wealthy M. P., had for 
years been in love with Miss Odd. Mary was now 
one-and-thirty, two years older than her brother, 
and people said that Mr. Apswith had fallen in love 
when she first came out twelve years ago. Mr. 
Apswith’s patience, perseverance, and fidelity were 
certainly admirable, but Peter, like most people, had 
thought that as Mary had, so far, found no difficulty 
in maintaining her severe independence, it would, 
in all probability, never yield to Mr. Apswith’s 
ardor. 

Mary, however, was a person to keep her own 
CQunsel. During her father’s lifetime, when much 
46 


PETER ODD 


responsibility and many duties had claimed her, she 
had certainly doubted more than once the possibility 
of Mr. Apswith’s ultimate success; there was a 
touch of the Diana in Mary, and a great deal of the 
Minerva. But, since her father’s death, since Peter’s 
bridal home-coming, Mary often found herself think- 
ing of Mr. Apswith, her fundamental sympathy with 
him on all things, her real loneliness and his devo^ 
tion. They had corresponded for years, and often 
saw one another. Familiarity had not bred con- 
tempt, but rather strengthened mutual trust and 
dependence. A certain tone of late in Mary’s 
letters had called forth from Mr. Apswith a most 
domineering and determined love-letter. Mary had 
yielded to it — gladly, as she now realized. Yet her 
heart yearned over Peter. He got up now, and 
kissed her. 

Mary, my dear girl ” — he could hardly find 
words — “ may you be very, very happy. You de- 
serve it ; so does he.” 

Neither touched, as they talked of the wonderful 
decision, on the fact that by it Peter would be left 
to the solitary companionship of his wife ; it was not 
a fact to be touched on. Mary longed to fling her 
arms around his neck and cry on his shoulder. Her 
happiness made his missing it so apparent, but she 
shrank from emphasizing their mutual knowledge. 

“We must ask Apswith down at once,” said Odd. 
“ It’s a busy session, but he can manage a few 
days.” 

“ Well, Peter, that is hardly necessary. I shall go 
up to London within the week. Lady Mainwaring 
asked me to go to Paris with her on the 20th. She 
47 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


stops in London for three days. I shall see Mr. 
Apswith there, get my trousseau in Paris, and be 
married in July, in about six weeks’ time. Delay 
would be rather silly — he has waited so long.” 

‘‘You take my breath away, Mary. I am selfish, 
I own. I don’t like to lose you.” 

“ It is n’t losing me, Peter dear. We shall see a 
lot of one another. I shall be married from here, 
of course. Mr. Apswith will stop with the Main- 
warings.” 

When Mary left him, Peter resumed his seat, and 
even went on writing for a few moments. Then he 
put down the pen and stretched himself, as one 
does when summoning courage. He did not lack 
courage, yet he owned to himself that Mary’s pros- 
pective departure sickened him. Her grave, even 
character had given him a sense of supporting sym- 
pathy ; he needed a sympathetic atmosphere ; and 
Alicia’s influence was a very air-pump. Poor Alicia, 
thought Odd. The sense of his own despair struck 
him as rather unmanly. He looked out of the open 
window at the lawn, its cool, green stretches 
whitened with the dew ; the rooks were cawing in 
the trees, and his thoughts went back suddenly to 
a certain morning in London, not two months ago, 
just after the baby’s death and just before Alicia’s 
departure for the Riviera. 

Alicia was lying on the sofa — Peter staring at the 
distant trees, did not see them but that scene — her 
magnificent health had made lying on sofas very 
uncharacteristic, and Odd had been struck with a 
gentle sort of compunction at the sight of the bronze 
head on the pillow, the thin white cheek. His heart 
48 


PETER ODD 


was very heavy. The paternal instincts are not 
said to be strong ; Odd had not credited himself 
with possessing them in any elevated form. Yet, 
now that the poor baby was dead, he realized how 
keen had been his interest in the little face, how 
keen the half-animal pleasure in the clinging of the 
tiny fingers, and as he looked at the baby in its small 
white coffin, he had realized, too, with a pang of 
longing that the little white face, like a flower among 
the flowers about it, was that of his child — dead. 

On that morning he bent over Alicia with some- 
thing of the lover’s tenderness in his heart, though 
Alicia had very nearly wrung all tenderness out of it. 

“ My dear girl, my poor, dear girl,” he said, kiss- 
ing her; and he sat down beside her on the sofa and 
smoothed back her hair. Alicia looked up at him 
with those wonderful eyes — looked up with a smile. 

“ Oh, I shall be all right soon enough, Peter.” 

Peter put his arm under her head and looked hard 
at her — her beauty entranced him as it had done 
from the beginning. 

“Alicia, Alicia, do you love me?” His earnest- 
ness pleased her ; she felt in it her own power. 

“ What a thing to ask, Peter. Did you ever 
imagine I did n’t ? ” 

“ Shall it bring us together, my wife, the death of 
our child ? Will you feel for my sorrow as I feel for 
yours, my poor darling?” 

“ Feel for you, Peter? Why, of course I do. It 
is especially hard on you, too, losing your heir.” 

Her look, her words crushed all the sudden im- 
pulse of resolve, hope, love even. 

“ My heir? ” Peter repeated, in a stumbling tone. 

4 49 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


** That has nothing to do with it. I was n’t think- 
ing of that.” 

Were n’t you ? ” said Alicia, rather wearily. She 
felt her weakness, it irked her, and her next words 
were more fretfully uttered — 

“ Of course I know you feel for me. Such a lot 
to go through, too, and for nothing.” She saw the 
pain setting her husband’s lips sternly. “ I suppose 
now, Peter, that you are imagining I care nothing 
about baby,” she remarked. 

“ I hope I am not a brute,” said Peter gloomily. 

“ You hope I "m not, too, no doubt.” 

“ Don’t, don’t, Alicia.” 

“ I felt awfully about it ; simply awfully,” Alicia 
declared. 

Odd, retracing the sorry little scene as he looked 
from his library windows, found that from it uncon- 
sciously he had dated an epoch, an epoch of resig- 
nation that had donned good-humor as its shield. 
Alicia could disappoint him no longer. 

In the first month of their married life, each rev- 
elation of emptiness had been an agony. Alicia was 
still mysterious to him, as must be a nature centered 
in its own shallowness to one at touch on all points 
with life in all its manifestations; her mind still 
remained as much a thing for conjecture as the 
mind of some animals. But Alicia’s perceptions 
were subtle, and he only asked now to keep from her 
all consciousness of his own marred life ; for he had 
marred it, not she. He was carefully just to Alicia. 

Mary remained at the Manor until all Alicia’s 
guests had arrived. Mrs. Marchant, an ugly, “ smart,” 
vivacious widow, splendid horsewoman, and good 

50 


PETER ODD 


singer ; Gladys le Breton, who was very blonde and 
fluffy as to head, just a bit made-up as to skin, 
harmless, pretty, silly, and supposed to be clever. 

“ Clever, I suppose,'’ Mary said to Lady Main- 
waring, “ because she has the reputation of doing 
foolish things badly — dancing on dinner-tables and 
thoroughly bite things like that. She has not danced 
on Peter’s table as yet.” 

Miss le Breton skirt-danced in the drawing-room, 
however, very prettily, and Peter’s placid contem- 
plation of her coyness irritated Mary. Miss le 
Breton’s coyness was too mechanical, too well worn 
to afford even a charitable point of view. 

“ Poor little girl,” said Peter, when she expressed 
her disapproval with some severity ; it is her 
nature. Each man after his own manner ; hers is 
to make a fool of herself,” and with this rather un- 
expected piece of opinion Mary was fully satisfied. 
As for Lord Calverly, she cordially hated the big 
man with the good manners and the coarse laugh. 
His cynical observation of Miss le Breton aroused 
quite a feeling of protecting partisanship in Mary’s 
breast, and his looks at Alicia made her blood boil. 
They were not cynical. Sir John Fleetinge was 
hardly more tolerable ; far younger, with a bonnie 
look of devil-may-care and a reputation for reckless- 
ness that made Mary uneasy. Peter was indifferent 
good-humor itself, but she thought the time might 
come when Peter’s good-humor might fail. 

The thought of Mr. Apswith was cheering ; but 
she hated to leave Peter dans cette galire, 

Peter, however, did not much mind the galire. 
His duties as host lay lightly on him. He did not 

51 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


mind Calverly at billiards, nor Fleetinge at the river, 
where they spent several mornings fishing silently 
and pleasantly together. Fleetinge had only met 
him casually in London clubs and drawing-rooms, 
but at close quarters he realized that literary tastes, 
which might have indicated a queer twist according 
to Sir John and an air of easy confidence in Mrs. 
Odd, would not make a definite falling in love with 
Mrs. Odd one whit the safer ; he rather renounced 
definiteness therefore, and rather liked Peter. 

Mary departed for London with Lady Mainwaring, 
and Alicia, as if to show that she needed no chaper- 
onage, conducted herself with a little less gayety than 
when Mary was there. 

She rode in the mornings with Lord Calverly and 
Captain Archinard — who had not, as yet, put into 
execution the hideous economy of selling his horses. 
In the evening she played billiards in a manly 
manner, and at odd hours she flirted, but not too 
forcibly, with Lord Calverly, Sir John, and with 
Captain Archinard in the beech-woods, or by lamp- 
light effects in the drawing-room. 

Peter had not forgotten Hilda and the strawberry 
beds, and one day Captain Archinard, who spent 
many of his hours at the Manor, was asked to bring 
his girls to tea. 

Hilda and Katherine found Lord Calverly and 
Mrs. Marchant in the drawing-room with Mrs. Odd, 
and their father, after a cursory introduction, left 
them to sit, side by side, on two tall chairs, while 
he joined the trio. Mrs. Marchant moved away to 
a sofa, the Captain followed her, and Alicia and 
Lord Calverly were left alone near the two children. 

52 


PETER ODD 


Katherine was already making sarcastic mental 
notes as to the hospitality meted out to Hilda and 
herself, and Hilda stared hard at Mrs. Odd. Mrs. 
Odd was more beautiful than ever this afternoon 
in a white dress ; Hilda wondered with dismay if 
Katherine could be right about her. Alicia, turning 
her head presently, met the wide absorbed gaze, 
and, with her charming smile, asked if they had 
brought their dogs — 

“ I saw such a lot of them about at your place the 
other day.” 

We did n’t know that you expected them to tea. 
We should have liked to bring them,” said Katherine, 
and Hilda murmured with an echo-like effect : “ We 
shotild have liked to ; Palamon howled dreadfully.” 

That Palamon ’s despair had been unnecessary 
made regret doubly keen. 

Hey ! What ’s that ?” Lord Calverly had been 
staring at Hilda and heard the faint ejaculation ; 
what is your dog called ? ” 

“ Palamon.” Hilda’s voice was reserved ; she had 
already thought that she did not like Lord Calverly, 
and now that he looked at her, spoke to her, she 
was sure of it. 

“ What funny names you give your dogs,” said 
Alicia. “ The other is called Darwin,” she added, 
looking at Lord Calverly with a laugh ; “ but Pala- 
mon is pretty — prettier than the monkey gentleman. 
What made you call him that ? ” 

It is out of ‘ The Knight’s Tale,’ ” said Kathe- 
rine ; “ Hilda is very fond of it, and called her dogs 
after the two heroes, Palamon and Arcite.” 

Lord Calverly had been trying to tease Hilda by 

53 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


the open admiration of his monocled gaze ; the 
fixed gravity of her stare, like a pretty baby’s, hugely 
amused him. 

So you like Chaucer ? ” Hilda averted her eyes, 
feeling very uncomfortable. Strong meat that for 
babes,” Lord Calverly added, looking at Alicia, who 
contemplated the children with pleasant vagueness. 

“ Never read it,” she replied briskly ; “ not to re- 
member. If I had had literary tastes in my infancy 
I might have read all the improper books without 
understanding them ; now I am too old to read them 
innocently.” 

Katherine listened to this dialogue with scorn for 
the speakers (she did not care for Chaucer, but she 
knew very well that to dispose of him as “ improper 
showed depths of Philistinism), and Hilda listened 
in alarm and wonder. Alicia’s expressive eyebrows 
and gayly languid eyes made her even more uncom- 
fortable than Lord Calverly’s appreciative monocle 
— the monocle turning on her more than once while 
its wearer lounged with abrupt, lazy laughs near 
Alicia. Hilda wondered if Mrs. Odd liked a man 
who could so laugh and lounge, and a vague disquiet 
and trouble, a child’s quick but ignorant sense of 
sadness stirred within her, for if Katherine had been 
right, then Mr. Odd must be unhappy. She sprang 
up with a long breath of relief and eagerness when 
he came in. Odd, with a half-humorous, half-cynical 
glance, took in the situation of his two little guests ; 
Alicia was evidently taking no trouble to claim them 
hers. He appreciated, too, Hilda’s glad face. 

“ I ’m sorry I have kept you waiting ; are you 
ready for strawberries ? ” 

54 


PETER ODD 


He shook hands, smiling at them. 

Don’t, please, put yourself out, Odd, in looking 
after my offspring,” called the Captain ; they can 
find their way to the garden without an escort.” 

“ But it won’t put me out to take them ; it would 
put me out very much if I could n’t,” and Odd 
smiled his kindliest at Hilda, who stood dubious 
and hesitating. 

Katherine thought it rather babyish to go into 
the garden for strawberries. She preferred to await 
tea in this atmosphere of unconscious inferiority ; 
these grown-up people who did not talk to her, and 
who were yet so much duller than she and Hilda. 
When Hilda went out with Mr. Odd she picked up 
some magazines, and divided her attention between 
the pictures and the couples. Papa and Mrs. Mar- 
chant did not interest her, but she found Alicia’s 
low, musical laughter, and the enjoyment with which 
she listened to Lord Calverly’s half-muffled utter- 
ances, full of psychological suggestions that would 
read very well in her journal. 

** He is probably flattering her,” thought Kathe- 
rine ; that is what she likes best.” 

Meanwhile Hilda had forgotten Lord Calverly’s 
stare and Alicia’s frivolity ; she was so glad, so glad 
to be with her big friend again. He took her first 
to the picture gallery — having noticed as they went 
through a room that her eyes swerved to a Turner 
water-color with evident delight. Hilda was silent 
before the great Velasquez, the Holbein drawings, 
the Chardin and the Corot ; but as they went from 
picture to picture, she would look up at Odd with 
her confident, gentle smile, so that, after the half- 
55 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


hour in the fine gallery, he felt sure that the child 
cared for the pictures as much as he did ; her silence 
was singularly sympathetic. As they went into the 
garden she confessed, in answer to his questions, 
that she would love to paint, to draw. 

‘‘All the beautiful, beautiful things to do ! ” she 
said ; “almost everything would be beautiful, 
would n’t it, if one were great enough ? ” 

The strawberry beds were visited, and — 

“ Shall we go down to the river and have a look 
at the scene of our first acquaintance ? ” asked Peter ; 
“ we have plenty of time before tea.” But, seeing 
the half-ashamed reluctance in Hilda’s eyes, “ Well, 
not there, then, but to the river ; there are even pret- 
tier places. Our boating-house is a mile from yours, 
and I ’ll give you a paddle in my Canadian canoe, — 
such a pretty thing. You must sit very still, you 
know, or you ’ll spill us both into the river.” 

“ I should n’t mind, as you would be there,” 
laughed Hilda ; and so they went through the sun- 
lit golden green of the beechwoods, and Hilda made 
the acquaintance of the Canadian canoe and of a 
mile or so of river that she had never seen before, 
and she and Peter talked together like the best and 
oldest of friends. 


56 


CHAPTER VII 



DD’S life of melancholy and good-humored 


resignation was cut short with an abruptness 
so startling that the needlessness of further resigna- 
tion deepened the melancholy to a lasting habit of 


mind. 


The melancholy that lies in the resignation to a 
ruinous mistake, the acceptance of ruin, and the 
nerving oneself to years of self-control and kindly 
endurance may well become a fine and bracing 
stoicism, but the shock of the irretrievably lost op- 
portunity, the eternally irremediable mistake, gave 
a sensitive mind a morbid faculty of self-questioning 
and self-doubt that sapped the very springs of energy 
and confidence. 

Mary’s wedding came off in July, and when Mr. 
and Mrs. Apswith were gone for two months’ cruis- 
ing in a friend’s yacht about the North Sea, Peter 
set to work with vigor. “ The Sonnet ” was in a 
year’s time to make him famous in the world of let- 
ters. In September, Mary and her husband went 
to their house in Surrey, and there Peter paid her a 
visit. Alicia found a trip to Carlsbad with friends 
more desirable. The friends were thoroughly irre- 
proachable — a middle-aged peer and his young and 
pretty but very sensible wife. 

Peter, in allowing her to enjoy herself after her 


57 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


own fashion, felt no weight of warning responsi- 
bility. But Alicia died suddenly at Carlsbad, and 
the horror of self-reproach, of bitter regret, that fell 
upon Odd when the news reached him at his sister’s, 
was as unjust as it was poignant. At Allersley the 
general verdict was that Mrs. Odd’s death had 
broken her husband’s heart, and Allersley, though 
arguing from false premises, was not far wrong. 
Odd was nearly heart-broken. That Alicia’s death 
should have lifted the weight of a fatal mistake from 
his life was a fact that tortured and filled him with 
remorse. Doubts and conjectures haunted him. 
Alicia might have dumbly longed for a sympathy 
for which she was unable to plead, and he to guess 
her longing. She had died away from him, without 
one word of mutual understanding, without one look 
of the love he once had felt and she accepted ; and 
bitterest of all came the horrid realism of the thought 
that his absence had not made death more bitter to 
her. He shut himself up in the Manor for three 
weeks, seeing no one, and then, in sudden rebellion 
against this passive suffering, determined to go to 
India. He had a second sister married there. The 
voyage would distract him, and change, movement, 
he must have. The news spread quickly over 
Allersley, and Allersley approved of the wisdom of 
the decision. 

At the Priory little Hilda Archinard was suffering 
in her way — the dreary suffering of childhood, with 
its sense of hopeless finality, of helpless inexperi- 
ence. Chasms of desolation deepened within her 
as she heard that her friend was going away. 

The sudden blossoming of her devotion to Odd 

58 


PETER ODD 


had widened her capabilities for conscious lone- 
liness. Her loneliness became apparent to her, 
and the immense place his smile, his kindness, her 
confident sense of his goodness had filled in her 
dreaming little life. Her aching pity for him was 
confused by a vague terror for herself. She could 
hardly bear the thought of his departure. Every 
day she walked all along the hedges and walls that 
divided the Priory from the Manor estate ; but she 
never saw him. The thought of not seeing him 
again, which at first had seemed impossible, now 
fixed upon her as a haunting obsession. 

“ Odd goes to-morrow,” the Captain announced 
one evening in the drawing-room. Katherine was 
playing, not very conscientiously but rather cleverly, 
a little air by Grieg. Hilda had a book on her lap, 
but she was not reading, and her father’s words 
seemed to stop her heart in its heavy beating. 

I met Thompson ” — Mr. Thompson was Peter’s 
land-agent — ‘‘ and everything is settled. Poor chap ! 
Thompson says he ’s badly broken up.” 

“ How futile to mourn over death,” Mrs. Archinard 
sighed from her sofa. “Tangled as we are in the 
webs of temperament, and environment, and circum- 
stance, should we not rather rejoice at the release 
from the great illusion ? ” Mrs. Archinard laid down 
a dreary French novel and vaguely yawned, while 
the Captain muttered something about talking “ rot ” 
before the children. 

“ Move this lamp away, Hilda,” said Mrs. Archi- 
nard. “ I think I can take a nap now, if Katherine 
will put on the soft pedal.” 

It was a warm autumn night, and the windows 

59 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


were open. Hilda slipped out when she had moved 
the lamp away. 

She could not go by the country road, nor scramble 
through the hedge, but to climb over the wall would 
be an easy matter. Hilda ran over the lawn, across 
the meadows, and through the woods. In the un- 
canny darkness her white dress glimmered like the 
flitting wings of a moth. As she came to the wall 
the moon seemed to slide from behind a cloud. 
Hilda’s heart stood still with a sudden terror at 
her loneliness there in the wood at night. The 
boy-like vault over the wall gave her an impetus of 
courage, and she began to run, feeling, as she ran, 
that the courage was only mechanical, that the moon, 
the mystery of a dimly seen infinity of tree trunks, 
the sorrow holding her heart as if in a physical pres- 
sure, were all terrible and terrifying. But Hilda, 
on occasions, could show an indomitable moral 
courage even while her body quaked, and she ran 
all the half-mile from the boundary wall to Allersley 
Manor without stopping. There was a light in the 
library window ; even at a distance she had seen it 
glowing between the trees. She ran more slowly 
over the lawn, and paused on the gravel path out- 
side the library to get her breath. Yes, he was 
there alone. She looked into the dignified quiet of 
the fine old room. A tall lamp threw a strong light 
on the pages of the book he held, and his head 
was in shadow. The window was ajar, and Hilda 
pushed it open and went in. 

At the sound Odd glanced up, and his face took 
on a look of half incredulous stupefaction. Hilda’s 
white face, tossed hair, the lamentable condition of 
6o 


PETER ODD 


her muslin frock, made of her indeed a startling 
apparition. 

“ My dear Hilda! ” he exclaimed. 

Hilda pressed her palms together, and stared 
silently at him. Mr. Odd’s face looked so much 
older ; its gravity made her heart stand still with 
an altogether new sense of calamity. She stood 
helplessly before him, tears brimming to her eyes. 

** My dear child, what is the matter? You 
positively frightened me.” 

“ I came to say ‘ Good-bye,* ” said Hilda brokenly. 

Peter’s gravity was mere astonishment and sym- 
pathetic dismay. The tear-brimmed eyes, after his 
weeks of solitary brooding, filled him with a most 
exquisite rush of pity and tenderness. 

“ Come here, you dear child,” he said, holding 
out his arms to her ; “ you came to say ‘ Good-bye?’ 
I am very grateful to you.” 

Hilda leaned her head against his shoulder and 
wept. After the frozen nightmare moment, the old 
kindness was a delicious contrast ; she almost forgot 
the purport of her journey, though she knew that 
she was crying. Odd stroked her long hair; her 
tears slightly amused and slightly alarmed him, 
even while the pathos of the affection they revealed 
touched him deeply. 

Did you come alone ? ” he asked. 

Hilda nodded. 

That was a very plucky thing to do. I thank 
you for it. There, can’t you smile at me ? Don’t 
cry.” 

Oh, I love you so much, I can hardly bear it.” 
Peter felt uncomfortable. The capacity for suffer- 

6i 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


ing revealed in these words gave him a sense of 
responsibility. Poor child ! Would her lot in life 
be to cry over people who were not worth it ? ” 

“ I shall come back some day, Hilda.” Hilda 
stopped crying, and Peter was relieved by the sobs’ 
cessation. “ I have a wandering fit on me just now ; 
you understand that, don’t you ? ” 

She held his hand tightly. She could not speak ; 
her heart swelled so at his tone of mutual under- 
standing. 

“ I am going to see my sister. I have n’t seen her 
for five years ; but long before another five years 
are passed I shall be here again, and the thing I 
shall most want to see when I get back will be your 
little face.” 

But you will be different then, I will be differ- 
ent, we will both be changed.” Hilda put her hands 
before her face and sobbed again. Peter was silent 
for a moment, rather aghast at the child’s apprehen- 
sion of the world’s deepest tragedy. He could not 
tell her that they would be unchanged — he the man 
of thirty-five, she the girl of seventeen. Poor little 
Hilda ! Her grief was but too well founded, and 
his thoughts wandered for a moment with Hilda’s 
words far away from Hilda herself. Hilda wiped 
her eyes and sat upright. Odd looked at her. He 
had a keen sense of the unconventional in beauty, 
and her tears had not disfigured her small face — had 
only made it strange. He patted her cheek and 
smiled at her. 

“ Cheer up, little one ! ” She evidently tried to 
smile back. 

“ I am afraid you have idealized me, my child — 
62 


PETER ODD 


it ’s a dangerous faculty. I am a very ordinary sort 
of person, Hilda ; you must not imagine fine things 
about me nor care so much. I ’m not worth one of 
those tears, poor little girl ! ” 

It was difficult to feel amused before her solemn 
gaze ; a sage prophecy of inevitable recovery would 
be brutal ; to show too much sympathy equally 
cruel. But the reality of her feeling dignified her 
grief, and he found himself looking gravely into her 
large eyes. 

“ You ’re not worth it ? ” she repeated. 

“ No, really.” 

I don’t imagine things about you.” 

“Well, I am glad of that,” said Peter, feeling 
rather at a loss. 

“ I love you dearly,”said Hilda, with a certain air 
of dreary dignity ; “ you are you. I don’t have to 
imagine anything.” 

Odd put her hand to his lips and kissed it gently. 

“ Thank you, my dear child. I love you too, and 
certainly I don’t have to imagine anything.” 

Hilda’s eyes, with their effect of wide, almost 
unseeing expansion, rested on his for a moment 
longer. She drew herself up, and a look of reso- 
lution, self-control, and fidelity hardened her young 
face. Odd still felt somewhat disconcerted, some- 
what at a loss. 

“ I must go now ; they don’t know that I am 
here.” 

“ They did n’t know that you were coming, I 
suppose ? ” 

“ No ; they would n’t have let me come if I had 
told them before, but I will tell them now.” 

63 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


Well, we will tell them together.” 

“ Are you going to take me home ? ” 

Did you imagine that I would let you go alone? ” 
You are very kind.” 

“And what are you, then? Your shoes are 
wringing wet, my child. Your dress is thin, too, 
for this time of year. Wrap this coat of mine 
around you. There ! and put on this hat.” 

Peter laughed as he coiffed her in the soft felt hat 
that came down over her ears ; she looked charming 
and quaint in the grotesque costume. Hilda re- 
sponded with a quiet, patient little smile, gathering 
together the wide sleeves of the covert coat. Odd 
lit a cigar, put on his own hat, took her hand, and 
they sallied forth. 

“You came across, I suppose ? ” 

“Yes, by the woods.” 

“And you were n’t frightened?” 

He felt the patient little smile in the darkness as 
she replied — 

“You know already that I am a coward.” 

“ I know, on the contrary, that you are amazingly 
courageous. The flesh may be weak, but the spirit 
is willing with a vengeance. Eh, Hilda ? ” 

“ Yes,” said Hilda vaguely. 

They walked in silence through the woods. 
Clouds hid the moon, and the wind had risen. 

Peter had dreary thoughts. He felt like a ghost 
in the ghost-like unreality of existence. The walk 
through the melancholy dimness seemed symbol- 
ical of a wandering, aimless life. The touch of 
Hilda Archinard’s little hand in his was comforting. 
When they had passed through the Priory shrub- 
64 


PETER ODD 


bery and were nearing the house, Hilda’s step beside 
him paused. 

^‘Will you kiss me ^ Good-bye ’ here, not before 
them all ? ” 

“ What beastly things * Good-byes ’ are,” Odd 
said, looking down at the glimmering oval of her 
uplifted face ; ** what thoroughly beastly things.” 
He took the little face between his hands and 
kissed her: ** Good-bye, dear little Hilda.” 

“ Thank you’ so much — for everything,” she said. 

** Thank you, my child. I shall not forget you.” 

Don’t be different. 7>y not to change.” 

Ah, Hilda ! Hilda ! ” 

That she, not he, would change was the inevi- 
table thing. He stooped and kissed again the child 
beside him. 

5 


65 









Part I 

KATHERINE 




CHAPTER I 


O DD knew that he was late as he drove down 
the Champs Elys^es in a rattling, closed fiacre. 
He and Besseint had talked so late into the evening 
that he had barely had time to get to his hotel in 
the Marboeuf quarter and dress. 

Besseint was one of the cleverest French writers 
of the day ; he and Peter had battled royally and 
delightfully over the art of writing, and as Besseint 
was certainly more interesting than would be the 
dinner at the Embassy, Peter felt himself excusable. 

Lady welcomed him unresentfully — 

“ Just, only just in time. I am going to send you 
down with Miss Archinard — over there talking to 
my husband — she is such a clever girl.” 

Peter was conscious of a shock of surprise ; a 
shock so strong that Lady saw a really strik- 

ing change come over his face. Peter himself was 
startled by his own pleasure and eagerness. 

“ Evidently you know her ; and evidently you 
were going to be bored and are not going to be 
now ! Your change of expression is really unflat- 
tering! ” Lady laughed good humoredly. 

** I have n’t seen her for ten years ; we were the 
greatest chums. Oh ! it is n’t Hilda, then ! ” Odd 
caught sight of the young lady. 

‘Mam ver}' sorry it is n’f‘ Hilda.’ Hilda is the 

69 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


beauty ; she is, unfortunately, almost an unknown 
quantity ; but Katherine will be a stepping-stone, 
and I assure you that she is worth cultivation on 
her own account.” 

Yes, Katherine was a stepping-stone ; that atoned 
somewhat for the disappointment that Odd felt as 
he followed his hostess across the room. 

Miss Archinard — an old friend. Mr. Odd tells 
me he has not seen you for ten years.” 

“ Mr. Odd ! ” cried Miss Archinard. She was evi- 
dently very glad to see him. 

** It is astonishing, isn’t it?” said Peter. “ Ten 
years does mean something, doesn’t it?” 

“ So much and yet so little. It has n’t changed 
you a bit,” said Katherine. **And here is papa. 
Papa, is n’t this nice ? Mr. Odd, do you remember 
the day you fished Hilda out of the river? Poor 
Hilda ! And her romantic farewell escapade ? ” 

Captain Archinard was changed ; his hair had 
become very white, and his good looks well worn, 
but his greeting had the cordiality of old friendship. 

“ And Hilda ? ” Peter questioned, as he and Kath- 
erine went into the dining-room together. “ Hilda 
is well? And as lovely as ever? ” 

“ Well, and as lovely as ever,” Katherine assured 
him. “ She is not here because she rarely goes out. 
Papa and I are the frivolous members of the family. 
Mamma goes in for culture, and Hilda for art.” 
Peter had a good look at her as they sat side by side. 

Katherine was no more beautiful than in child- 
hood, but she was distinctly interesting and — yes — 
distinctly charming. Her black eyes, deeply set 
under broad eyebrows, held the same dominant 
70 


KATHERINE 


significance ; humorous, cynical, clever eyes. Her 
white teeth gave a brilliant gayety to her smile. 
There was distinction in her coiffure — the thick 
deeply rippled hair parted on one side, and coiled 
smoothly from crown to neck ; and Peter recognized 
in her dress a personal taste as distinctive — the long 
unbroken lines of her nasturtium velvet gown were 
untinged by any hint of so-called artistic dowdiness, 
and yet the dress wrinkled about her waist as she 
moved with a daring elegance far removed from 
the moulded conventionality of the other women’s 
bodices. This glowing gown was cut off the shoul- 
ders ; Katherine’s shoulders were beautiful, and 
they were triumphantly displayed. 

“ And now, please tell me,” said Peter, “ how it 
comes that I have n’t seen you for ten years ? ” 

“ How comes it that we have not seen you f You 
have been everywhere, and so have we ; really it is 
odd that we should never have met. Of course 
you know that we left the Priory only a year after 
you went to India?” 

Peter nodded. 

I was dismayed to find you gone when I got 
back. I heard vague rumors of Florence, and when 
I went there one winter you had disappeared.” 

We must have been in Dresden. How I hated 
it ! All the shabby second-rate culture of the world 
seems to gravitate to Dresden. We had to let the 
Priory, you know. We are so horribly poor.” 

Katherine’s smiling assertion was not carried out 
in her appearance, yet the statement put a bond of 
familiarity between them; Katherine spoke as to 
an old friend who had a right to know. 

71 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“ Then we had a year or two at Dinard — loath- 
some place I think it ! Then Florence again, and 
at last Paris, and here we have been for over three 
years, and here we shall probably stick for who 
knows how long ! Hilda’s painting gives us a rea- 
sonable background ; at least as reasonable as such 
exiles can hope for.” 

“ But you don’t mean to say that your exile is 
indefinite ? ” 

Katherine nodded, with eyebrows lifted and a sug- 
gestion of shrug in the creamy expanse of shoulder. 

And Hilda paints? Well?” 

“ Hilda paints really well. She has always painted, 
and her work is really individual, unaffectedly indi- 
vidual, and that ’s the rare thing, you know. Over 
four years of atelier work didn’t scotch Hilda’s 
originality, and she has a studio of her own now, 
and is never happy out of it.” 

What kind of work does she go in for ? ” Peter 
was conscious of a vague uneasiness about Hilda. 

Portraits ? ” 

No ; Hilda is not very good at likenesses. Her 
things are very decorative — not Japanese either — 
except in their air of choice and selection ; well, 
you must see them, they really are original, and, 
in their own little way, quite delightful ; they are, 
perhaps, a wee bit like baby Whistlers — not that 
I intimate any real resemblance — but the sense of 
color, the harmony ; but you must see them,” Kath- 
erine repeated. 

“ And Mrs. Archinard ? ” Peter felt some remorse 
at having forgotten that rather effaced personality. 

“ Mamma is just the same, only stronger than 
72 


KATHERINE 


she used to be in England. I think the Continent 
suits her better. And you , Mr. Odd. The idea 
of talking about such nobodies as we are when you 
have become such a personage ! You have become 
rather cynical too, have n’t you ? As a child you 
did not make a cynical impression on me, and your 
‘ Dialogues ’ did. I think you are even more cynical 
than Renan. Some stupid person spoke to me of a 
between your ‘ Dialogues ’ and his‘ Dialogues 
Philosophiques.’ I don’t imply that, except that 
you are both sceptical and both smiling, only your 
smile is more bitter, your scepticism less frivolous.” 

“ I ’m sceptical as to people, not as to principles,” 
said Peter, smiling not bitterly. 

“ Yet you are not a misanthrope, you do not hate 
people.” 

I don’t admire them.” 

“You would like to help them to become more 
admirable. Ah ! The Anglo-Saxon is strong within 
you. You are not at all like Renan. And then 
you went in for Parliamentary honors too ; three 
years ago, was n’t it ? Why did n’t you keep on? ” 

“ Because I did n’t keep my seat when my party 
went out. The honors were dubious. Miss Archi- 
nard. I cut a very ineffective figure.” 

“ I remember meeting a man here at the time who 
said you were n’t ‘ practical,’ and I liked you for it 
too. If only you had kept in we should surely have 
met. Hilda and I were in London this spring.” 

“Were you? And I was in Japan. I only got 
back three weeks ago.” 

“ How you do dash about the globe. But you 
have been to Allersley since getting back ? ” 

73 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


Only for a day or two. But tell me about your 
spring in London.” 

“ We were with Lady Mainwaring.” 

Ah, I did not see her when I was at Allersley. 
That accounts for my having had no news of you. 
You did not see my sister in London ; she has been 
in the country all this year. You went to Court, I 
suppose ? ” 

“Yes, Lady Mainwaring presented us.” 

“And Hilda enjoyed herself?” 

Katherine smiled : “ How glad you will be to see 
Hilda. Yes, enjoyed herself after a fashion, I think. 
She only stopped a month. She does n’t care much 
for that sort of thing really.” 

Katherine did not say, hardly knew perhaps, that 
the reproachful complaint of Mrs. Archinard’s weekly 
letter had cut short Hilda’s season, and brought her 
back to the little room in the little appartementy 
au dessus de Ventresol^ where Mrs. Archinard 
spent her days as she had spent them at Allersley, 
at Dresden, at Dinard, at Florence. Change of sur- 
roundings made no change in Mrs. Archinard’s lace- 
frilled recumbency, nor in the air of passive long- 
suffering that went with so much appreciation of 
her own merits and other people’s deficiencies. 

“ But Hilda’s month meant more than other girls’ 
years,” Katherine went on ; “ you may imagine the 
havoc she played, all unconsciously, poor Hilda ! 
Hilda is the most unconscious person. She fixes 
one with those big vague eyes of hers. She fixed, 
among other people, another old friend,” and 
Katherine smiled, adding with lowered tone, “ Allan 
Hope.” 


74 


KATHERINE 


Peter was not enough conscious of a certain inner 
irritation to attempt its concealment. 

Allan Hope?” he repeated. ‘‘It is impossible 
for me to imagine little Hilda with lovers; and 
Allan Hope one of them ! ” 

“ Allan Hope is very nice,” Katherine said lightly. 

“ Nice ? Oh, thoroughly nice. But to think that 
Hilda is grown up, not a child.” 

Odd looked with a certain tired playfulness at 
Katherine. 

“ And you are grown up too ; have lovers too. 
What a pity it is.” 

“ That depends.” Katherine laughed. “ But re- 
grets of that kind are unnecessary as far as Hilda is 
concerned. I don’t think little Hilda is much less 
the child than when you last saw her. Having 
lovers does n’t imply that one is ready for them, 
and I don’t think that Hilda is ready.” 

Odd had looked away from her again, and Kathe- 
rine’s black eyes rested on him with a sort of musing 
curiosity. She had not spoken quite truthfully in 
saying that the ten years had left him unchanged. 
A good deal of white in the brown hair, a good 
many lines about eyes and mouth might not consti- 
tute change, but Katherine had seen, in her first 
keen clear glance at the old friend, that these badges 
of time were not all. 

There had been something still boyish about the 
Mr. Odd of ten years ago ; the lines at the eye 
corners were still smiling lines, the quiet mouth still 
kind ; but the whole face wore the weary, almost 
heavy look of middle age. 

“ His Parliamentary experience probably knocked 

75 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 

the remaining illusions out of him,” Katherine re- 
flected. “ He was certainly very unsuccessful, he 
tried for such a lot too, sought obstacles. He should 
mellow a bit now (that smile of his is bitter) into 
resignation, give up the windmill hunt (I think all 
nice men go through the Quixotic phase), stop at 
home and write homilies. And he certainly, cer- 
tainly ought to marry ; marry a woman who would 
be nice to him.” And it was characteristic of 
Katherine that already she was turning over in her 
mind the question as to whether it would be feasible, 
or rather desirable — for Katherine intended to please 
herself, and had not many doubts as to possibilities 
if once she could make up her mind — to contemplate 
that role for herself. Miss Archinard was certainly 
the last woman in the world to be suspected of 
matrimonial projects ; her frank, almost manly bon- 
homie, and her apparent indifference to ineligibility 
had combined to make her doubly attractive ; and 
indeed Katherine was no husband-hunter. She 
would choose, not seek. She certainly intended to 
get married, and to a husband who would make life 
definitely pleasant, definitely successful ; and she 
was very keenly conscious of the eligibility or un- 
fitness of every man she met ; only as the majority 
had struck her as unfit. Miss Archinard was still 
unmarried. Now she said to herself that Peter Odd 
would certainly be nice to his wife, that his position 
was excellent — not glittering — Katherine would 
have liked glitter, and the more the better ; and yet 
with that long line of gentlefolk ancestry, that old 
Elizabethan house and estate, far above the shallow 
splendor of modern dukedoms or modern wealth, fit 
76 


KATHERINE 


only to impress ignorance or vulgarity. He had 
money too, a great deal. Money was a necessity if 
one wanted a life free for highest flights ; and she 
added very calmly that she might herself, after 
consideration, find it possible to be nice to him. 
Rather amusing, Katherine thought it, to meet a 
man whom one could at once docket as eligible, and 
find him preoccupied with a dreamy memory of 
such slight importance as Hilda’s child friendship ; 
but Katherine’s certainty of the slightness — and 
this man of forty looked anything but sentimental — 
left her very tolerant of his preoccupation. 

Hilda was a milestone, a very tiny milestone in 
his life, and it was to the distant epoch her good-bye 
on that autumn night had marked as ended, rather 
than to the little closing chapter itself, that he was 
looking. Indeed his next words showed as much. 

“ How many changes — forgive the truism, of 
course — in ten years ! Did you know that my 
sister, Mrs. Apswith, had half-a-dozen babies? I 
find myself an uncle with a vengeance.” 

“ I have n’t seen Mrs. Apswith since she was 
married. It does seem ages ago, that wedding.” 

Mary has drawn a lucky number in life,” said 
Odd absently. 

“ She expects you to settle down definitely now, 
I suppose ; in England, at Allersley?” 

“ Yes, I shall. I shall go back to Allersley in a 
few months. It is rather lonely.” 

Why don’t you fill it with people ? ” 

“ You forget that I don’t like people,” said Odd. 

“You prefer loneliness, with your principles for 
company. There will be something of martyrdom, 

77 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


then, when you at last settle down to your duty as 
landowner and country gentleman.” 

“ Oh, I shall do it without any self-glorification. 
Perhaps you will come back to the Priory. That 
would mitigate the loneliness.” 

“ The sense of our nearness. Of course you 
would n’t care to see us ! No, I think I prefer Paris 
to the Priory.” 

What do you do with yourself in Paris?” 

‘‘Very little that amounts to anything,” Kathe- 
rine owned ; “ one can’t very well when one is poor 
and not a genius. If one is n’t born with them, one 
must buy weapons before one can fight. I feel I 
should be a pretty good fighter if I had my weapons ! ” 
and Katherine’s dark eye, as it flashed round on him 
in a smile, held the same suggestion of gallant dar- 
ing with which she had impressed him on that 
morning by the river ten years ago. He looked at 
her contemplatively ; the dark eyes pleased him. 

“Yes,” he said, “I think you would be a good 
fighter. What would you fight? ” 

“ The world, of course : and one only can with its 
own weapons, more’s the pity.” 

“ And the flesh and the devil,” Odd suggested; 
“is this to be a moral crusade? ” 

“ I ’m afraid I can’t claim that. I only want to 
conquer for the fun of conquering ; ‘ to ride in tri- 
umph through Persepolis,’ like Tamburlaine, chain 
up people I don’t like in cages ! Oh, of course, Per- 
sepolis would be a much nicer place when once I 
held it, I should be delightful to the people I 
liked.” 

“ And all the others would be in cages ! ” 

78 


KATHERINE 


“ They would deserve it if I put them there ! I 'm 
very kind-hearted, very tolerant.” 

** And when you have conquered the world, what 
then ? As life is not all marching and caging.” 

“ I shall live in it after my own fashion. I am 
ambitious, Mr. Odd, but not meanly so, I assure 
you.” 

“ No ; not meanly so, I am sure.” Odd’s eyes 
were quietly scrutinizing, as, another sign of the ten 
years, he adjusted a pair of eyeglasses and looked at 
her, but not, as Katherine felt, unsympathetic. 

** And meanwhile ? you will find your weapons in 
time, no doubt, but, meanwhile, what do you do 
with yourself ? ” 

** Meanwhile I study my milieu, I go out a good 
deal, if one can call it going out in this dubious 
Parisian, Anglo-American milange ; I read a bit, and 
I bicycle in the Bois with papa in the morning. It 
sounds like sentimentality, but I do feel that there 
is an element of tragedy in papa and myself bicy- 
cling. Oh, for a ride across country ! ” 

** You rode so well, too, Mary told me.” 

“ Yes, I rode well, otherwise I should n’t regret 
it.” Katherine smiled with even more assurance 
under the added intensity of the pince-nez. 

You enjoy the excelling, then, more than the 
feeling.” 

** That sounds vain ; I certainly should n’t feel 
pleasure if I were conscious of playing second fiddle 
to anybody.” 

“A very vain young lady,” Odd’s smile was quite 
alertly interested, and a self-conscious young lady, 
too.” 


79 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


** Yes, rather, I think,” Katherine owned ; frank- 
ness became her, “ but I am very conscious of every- 
thing, myself included. I am merely one among 
the many phenomena that come under my notice, 
and, as I am the nearest of them all, naturally the 
most intimately interesting. Every one is self- 
conscious, Mr. Odd, if they have any personality at 
all.” 

“And you are clever,” Peter pursued, in a tone of 
enumeration, his smile becoming definitely humor- 
ous as he added : “ And I am very impudent.” 

Katherine was not sure that she had made just 
the effect she had aimed for, but certainly Mr. Odd 
would give her credit for frankness. 

It was agreed that he should come for tea the 
next afternoon. 

“ After five,” Katherine said ; “ Hilda does n’t get 
in till so late ; and I know that Hilda is the c/ou of 
the occasion.” 

“ Does Hilda take her painting so seriously as all 
that ? ” 

“ She does n’t care about anything, anything 
else,” Katherine said gravely, adding, still gravely, 
“ Hilda is very, very lovely.” 

“ I hope you were n’t too much disappointed,” 

Lady said to Odd, just before he was going ; 

“ is she not a charming girl ? ” 

“She really is; the disappointment was only 
comparative. It was Hilda whom I knew so well. 
The dearest little girl.” 

“ I have not seen much of her,” Lady said, 

with some vagueness of tone. “ I have called on 
Mrs, Archinard, a very sweet woman, clever, too ; 
8o 


KATHERINE 


but the other girl was never there. I don’t fancy 
she is much help to her mother, you know, as Kathe- 
rine is. Katherine goes about, brings people to see 
her mother, makes a milieu for her ; such a sad in- 
valid she is, poor dear! But Hilda is wrapt up in 
her work, I believe. Rather a pity, don’t you think, 
for a girl to go in so seriously for a fad like that ? 
She paints very nicely, to be sure ; I fancy it all 
goes into that, you know.” 

“ What goes into that ? ” Odd asked, conscious 
of a little temper ; all seemed combined to push 
Hilda more and more into a slightly derogatory and 
very mysterious background. 

Well, she is not so clever as her sister. Kathe- 
rine can entertain a roomful of people. Grace, tact, 
sympathy, the impalpable something that makes 
success of the best kind, Katherine has it.” 

Katherine’s friendly, breezy frankness had cer- 
tainly amused and interested Odd at the dinner- 

table, but Lady ’s remarks now produced in him 

one of those quick and unreasoning little revulsions 
of feeling by which the judgments of a half-hour be- 
fore are suddenly reversed. Katherine’s cleverness 
was that of the majority of the girls he took 
down to dinner, rather voulu^ banal, tiresome. Odd 
felt that he was unjust, also that he was a little 
cross. 

“ There are some clevernesses above entertaining 
a roomful of people. After all, success isn’t the 
test, is it ? ” 

Lady smiled, an unconvinced smile — 

You should be the last person to say that.” 

I ? ” Odd made no attempt to contradict the 
6 8l 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


evident flattery of his hostess’ tones, but his ejacu- 
lation meant to himself a volume of negatives. If 
success were the test, he was a sorry failure. 

He was making his way out of the room when 
Captain Archinard stopped him. 

I have hardly had one word with you. Odd,” 
said the Captain, whose high-bridged nose and finely 
set eyes no longer saved his face from its funda- 
mental look of peevish pettiness. ‘‘ Mrs. Brooke is 
going to take Katherine home. It’s a fine night, 
won’t you walk ? ” 

Odd accepted the invitation with no great satis- 
faction ; he had never found the Captain sympathetic. 
After lifting their hats to Mrs. Brooke and Katherine 
as they drove out of the Embassy Courtyard, the 
two men turned into the Rue du Faubourg St. 
Honors together. 

We are not far from you, you know,” the Cap- 
tain said — “ Rue Pierre Charron ; you said you were 
in the Marboeuf quarter, did n’t you ? We are rather 
near the Trocadero, uphill, so I ’ll leave you at the 
door of your hotel.” 

They lit cigars and walked on rather silently. 
The late October night was pleasantly fresh, and 
the Champs Elys^es, as they turned into it, almost 
empty between the upward sweep of its line of 
lights. 

‘‘Ten years is a jolly long time,” remarked Cap- 
tain Archinard, “and a jolly lot of disagreeable 
things may happen in ten years. You knew we ’d 
left the Priory, of course?” 

“ I was very sorry to hear it.” 

“ Devilish hard luck. It wasn’t a choice of evils, 
82 


KATHERINE 


though, if that is any consolation ; it was that or 
starvation.” 

“ As bad as that ? ” 

“Just as bad; the horses went first, and then 
some speculations — safe enough they seemed, and, 
sure enough, went wrong. So that, with one thing 
and another, I hardly knew which way to turn. To 
tell the truth, I simply can’t go back to England. 
I have a vague idea of a perfect fog of creditors. I 
have been able to let the Priory, but the place is 
mortgaged up to the hilt ; and devilish hard work 
it is to pay the interest ; and hard luck it is alto- 
gether,” the Captain repeated. “ Especially hard 
on a man like me. My wife is perfectly happy. I 
keep all worry from her ; she does n’t know any- 
thing about my troubles ; she lives as she has always 
lived. I make that a point, sacrifice myself rather 
than deprive her of one luxury.” The tone in which 
the Captain alluded to his privations rather made 
Peter doubt their reality. “ And the two children 
live as they enjoy it most ; a very jolly time they 
have of it. But what is my life, I ask you ? ” The 
Captain’s voice was very resentful. Odd almost felt 
that he in some way was to blame for the good 
gentleman’s unhappy situation. “What is my life, 
I ask you ? I go dragging from post to pillar with 
stale politics in the morning, and five o’clock tea 
in grass widows’ drawing-rooms for all distraction. 
Paris is full of grass widows,” he added, with an even 
deepened resentment of tone ; “ and I never cared 
much about the play, and French actresses are so 
deuced ugly, at least I find them so, even if I cared 
about that sort of thing, which I never did — much,” 

83 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


and the Captain drew disconsolately at his cigar, 
taking it from his lips to look at the tip as they 
passed beneath a lamp. 

“ I can hardly afford myself tobacco any longer,” 
he declared, ** smokable tobacco. Thought I ’d econ- 
omize on these, and they 're beastly, like all econom- 
ical things ! ” And the Captain cast away the cigar 
with a look of disgust. 

Peter offered him a substitute. 

** You are a lucky dog. Odd, to come to contrasts,” 
the Captain paused to shield his lighted match as 
he applied it to the fresh cigar ; “ I don’t see why 
things should be so deuced uneven in this world. 
One fellow born with a silver spoon in his mouth — 
and you Ve got a turn for writing, too ; once one’s 
popular, that ’s the best paying thing going, I sup- 
pose — and the other hunted all over Europe, through 
no fault of his own either. Rather hard, I think, 
that the man who does n’t need money should be 
born with a talent for making it.” 

** It certainly is n’t just.” 

** Damned unjust.” 

Odd felt that he was decidedly a culprit, and 
smiled as he smoked and walked beside the rebel- 
lious Captain. He was rather sorry for him. Odd 
had wide sympathies, and found whining, feeble 
futility pathetic, especially as there was a certain 
amount of truth in the Captain’s diatribes, the old 
eternal truth that things are not evenly divided in 
this badly managed world. It would be kinder to 
immediately offer the loan for which the Captain 
was evidently paving the way to a request. But he 
reflected that the display of such quickness of com- 

84 


KATHERINE 


prehension might make the request too easy ; and in 
the future the Captain might profit by a discovered 
weakness a little too freely. He would let him ask. 
And the Captain was not long in coming to the 
point. He was in a devilish tight place, positively 
could n’t afford a pair of boots (Peter’s eyes invol- 
untarily sought the Captain’s feet, neatly shod in 
social patent-leather), could Odd let him have one 
hundred pounds ? (The Captain was frank enough 
to make no mention of repayment) etc., etc. 

Peter cut short the explanation with a rather un- 
wise manifestation of sympathetic comprehension ; 
the Captain went upstairs with him to his room 
when the hotel was reached, and left it with a check 
for 3000 francs in his pocket ; the extra 5CX) francs 
were the price of Peter’s readiness. 

85 


CHAPTER II 

I T rained next day, and Peter took a fiacre from 
the Biblioth^que Nationale, where he had spent 
the afternoon diligently, and drove through the gray 
evening to the Rue Pierre Charron. It was just 
five when he got there, and already almost dark. 
There were four flights to be ascended before one 
reached the Archinards’ apartment ; four steep and 
rather narrow flights, for the house was not one 
of the larger newer ones, and there was no lift. 
Wilson, whom Odd remembered at Allersley, opened 
the door to him. Captain Archinard had evidently 
not denuded himself of a valet when he had parted 
with his horses ; that sacrifice had probably seemed 
too monstrous, but Peter wondered rather whether 
Wilson’s wages were ever paid, and thought it more 
probable that a mistaken fidelity attached him to 
his master. In view of year-long arrears, he might 
have found it safer to stay with a future possibility 
of payment than, by leaving, put an end forever 
to even the hope of compensation. 

The little entrance was very pretty, and the draw- 
ing-room, into which Peter was immediately ushered, 
even prettier. Evidently the Archinards had brought 
their own furniture, and the Archinards had very 
good taste. The pale gray-greens of the room were 
86 


KATHERINE 


charming. Peter noticed appreciatively the Copen- 
hagen vases filled with white flowers ; he could find 
time for appreciation as he passed to Mrs. Archi- 
nard’s sofa, for no one else was in the room, a fact of 
which he was immediately and disappointedly aware. 
Mrs. Archinard was really improved. Her husband’s 
monetary embarrassments had made even less im- 
pression on her than upon the surroundings, for 
though the little salon was very pretty, it was not 
the Priory drawing-room, and Mrs. Archinard was, 
if anything, plumper and prettier than when Peter 
had last seen her. 

“ This is really quite too delightful ! Quite too de- 
lightful, Mr. Odd ! ” Mrs. Archinard’s slender hand 
pressed his with seemingly affectionate warmth. 
“ Katherine told us this morning about the rencontre. 
I was expecting you, as you see. Ten years ! It 
seems impossible, really impossible ! Still holding 
his hand, she scanned his face with her sad and 
pretty smile. ** I could hardly realize it, were it 
not that your books lie here beside me, living sym- 
bols of the years.” 

Peter indeed saw, on the little table by the sofa, 
the familiar bindings. 

I asked Katherine to get them out, so that I 
might look over them again ; strengthen my impres- 
sion of your personality, join all the links before 
meeting you again. Dear, dear little books ! ” Mrs. 
Archinard laid her hand, with its one great emerald 
ring, on the Dialogues,” which was uppermost. 

Sit down, Mr. Odd ; no, on this chair. The light 
falls on your face so. Yes, your books are to me 
among the most exquisite art productions of our age. 

87 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


Pater is more ^tincellant — a style too jewelled per- 
haps — one wearies of the chain of rather heartless 
beauty ; but in your books one feels the heart, the 
aroma of life — a chain of flowers, flowers do not 
weary. Your personality is to me very sympathetic, 
Mr. Odd, very sympathetic.” 

Peter was conscious of being sorry for it. 

“ I think we are both of us tired.” Mrs. Archi- 
nard’s smile grew even more sadly sweet ; both 
tired, both hopeless, both a little indifferent too. 
How few things one finds to care about ! Things 
crumble so, once touched, do they not? Every- 
thing crumbles.” Mrs. Archinard sighed, and, as 
Peter found nothing to say (“ How dull a man who 
writes quite clever books can be ! ” thought Mrs. 
Archinard), she went on in a more commonplace 
tone — 

“ And you talked with dear Katherine last night ; 
you pleased her. She told Hilda and me this morn- 
ing that you really pleased her immensely. Kathe- 
rine is hard to please. I am proud of my girl, Mr. 
Odd, very, very proud. Did you not find her quite 
distinctive ? Quite significant ? I always think of 
Katherine as significant, many facetted, meaning 
much.” The murmuring modulations of Mrs. Archi- 
nard’s voice irritated Odd to such a pitch of ill-tem- 
pcr that he found it difficult to keep his own pleasant 
as he replied — ■ 

“ Significant is most applicable. She is a charm- 
ing girl.” 

“Yes, charming; that too applies, and oh, what a 
misapplied word it is ! Every woman nowadays 
is called charming. The daintily distinctive term is 
88 


KATHERINE 


flung at the veriest schoolroom hoyden, as at the 
hard, mechanical woman of the world.” 

Peter now said to himself that Mrs. Archinard 
was an ass — very unjustly — Mrs. Archinard was far 
from being an ass. She felt the atmosphere with 
unerring promptitude. Her effects were not to be 
made upon ce type Ih. She welcomed Katherine’s 
entrance as a diversion from looming boredom. 
Katherine seemed to go in for a regal simplicity in 
dress. Her gown was again of velvet, a deep ame- 
thyst color. The high collar and the long sleeves 
that came over her white hands in points were edged 
with a narrow line of sable. A necklace of ame- 
thysts lightly set in gold encircled the base of her 
throat. Peter liked to see a well-dressed woman, and 
Katherine was more than well dressed. In the 
pearly tints of the room she made a picture with her 
purple gleams and shadows. 

I am glad to see you. Sit down. It is nice to 
have you in our little diggings. You are like a bit 
of England sitting there — a big bit ! ” 

And you are a perfectly delightful condensation 
of everything delightfully Parisian.” 

The heart is British. True oak!” laughed 
Katherine ; don’t judge me by the foliage.” 

“ Ah, but it needs a good deal of Gallic genius to 
choose such foliage.” 

“ No, no. I give the credit to my American blood, 
to mamma. But thanks, very much. I am glad 
you are appreciative.” Katherine smiled so gayly, 
and looked so charmingly in the amethyst velvet, 
that Peter forgot for a moment to wonder where 
Hilda was, but Katherine did not forget. 

89 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“ I expect Hilda every moment. I have told them 
to wait tea until she comes, .poor dear ! ‘ Them ’ is 

Wilson, whom you saw, I suppose ; Taylor, our old 
maid ; and the cook ! The cook is French, other- 
wise our staff is shrunken, but of the same elements. 
One does n’t mind having no servants in a little box 
like this. Yes, mamma, I have paid all the calls, 
and only two people were out ; so I deserve petting 
and tea. I hope Hilda will hurry.” Mrs. Archi- 
nard’s face took on a look of ill-used resignation. 

“ We all pay dearly for Hilda’s egotism,” she re- 
marked, and for a moment there was a rather un- 
comfortable silence. Odd felt a queer indignation 
and a queerer melancholy rising within him. 

The Hilda of to-day seemed far further away than 
the Hilda of ten years ago. They talked in a rather 
desultory fashion for some time. Mrs. Archinard’s 
presence was damping, and even Katherine’s smile 
was like a flower seen through rain. The little clock 
on the mantelpiece struck the quarter. 

“ Almost six ! ” exclaimed Katherine ; “ we must 
have tea.” 

“ Yes, we may sacrifice ourselves, but we must not 
sacrifice Mr. Odd,” said Mrs. Archinard with distinct 
fretfulness. Taylor answered the bell, and Peter, 
with a quickness of combination that surprised him- 
self, surmised that Hilda was out alone. Had she 
become emancipated ? Bohemian ? His melancholy 
grew stronger. Tea was brought, a charming set of 
daintiest white and a little silver teapot of a quaint 
and delicate design. 

“ Hilda designed it in Florence,” said Katherine, 
seeing him looking at it ; ‘‘ an Italian friend had it 
90 


KATHERINE 


made for her after her own model and drawings. 
Yes, Hilda goes in for decorative work a good deal. 
People who know about it have admired that teapot, 
as you do, I see.” 

It ’s a lovely thing,” said Peter, as Katherine 
turned it before him ; “ the simplicity of the outline 
and the delicate bas-relief ” — he bent his head to 
look more closely — “exquisite.” And he thought 
it rather rough on Hilda ; to pour the tea from her 
own teapot without waiting for her. 

Still, he owned, when at last the door-bell rang at 
fully half-past six, that he might have been asking 
for too much patience. 

“ There she is,” said Katherine ; “ I must go and 
tell her that you are here.” Katherine went out, 
and Odd heard a murmured colloquy in the entrance. 
He was conscious of feeling excited, and uncon- 
sciously rose to his feet and looked eagerly toward 
the door. But only Katherine came in. 

“I don’t believe I shall ever see Hilda!” he ex- 
claimed, with an assumption of exasperation that 
hid some real nervousness. Katherine laughed. 

“ Oh yes, you shall, in five minutes. She had to 
wash her face and hands. Artists are untidy people, 
you know,” and Odd, with that same strange acute- 
ness of perception with which he seemed dowered 
this afternoon, felt that Hilda had been coming in 
in all her artistic untidiness, and that Katherine had 
seen to a more respectable e7ttr^e. 

It rather irritated him with Katherine, and that 
tactful young lady probably guessed at his disap- 
pointment, for she went to the piano and began to 
play a sad aria from one of Schumann’s Sonatas that 

91 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


sighed and pled and sobbed. She played very well, 
with the same perfect taste that she showed in her 
gowns, and Peter was too fond of music, too fond 
of Schumann especially, not to listen to her. 

In the middle of the aria Hilda came in. It was 
over in a moment, the meeting, as the most exciting 
things in life are. Peter had not realized till the 
moment came how much it would excite him. 

Hilda came in and walked up to him. She put 
her hand in his with all the pretty gravity he remem- 
bered in the child. Odd took the other hand too 
and stared at her. He was conscious then of being 
very much excited, and conscious that she was not. 

Her eyes were “big and vague,” but they were 
the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen, and the 
vagueness was only in a certain lack of expression, 
for they looked straight into his. Carried along by 
that first impulse of excitement, despite the little 
shock of half-felt disappointment, Peter bent his 
head and kissed her on each cheek. 

“ Bravo ! ” said Katherine, still striking soft chords 
at the piano, “ Bravo, Mr. Odd ! considering your 
first meeting and your last parting, you have a 
right to that ! ” And Katherine laughed pleasantly, 
though she was a trifle displeased. 

“ Yes, I have, haven’t I?” said Peter, smiling. 
He still held Hilda’s hands. The little flush that 
had come to her cheeks when he had kissed her was 
gone, and she looked very white. 

“ Are you glad to see me, Hilda? ” he asked ; “ I 
beg your pardon, but it comes naturally to call you 
that.” 

“ I am very glad to see you, Mr. Odd,” Hilda 
92 


KATHERINE 


smiled. Her voice was very like the child’s voice 
saying, “ I thank you very much,” ten years ago. 
The same voice, grave and gentle. Odd had ex- 
pected some little warmth, some little embarrass- 
ment even, in the girl, considering the parting from 
the child. But Hilda did not show any warmth, 
neither did she seem at all embarrassed, and Odd 
felt rather as one does when an unnecessary down- 
ward stride reveals level ground where one expected 
another step. He had stumbled a little, and now, 
half ruefully, half humorously, he considered the 
child Hilda grown up. She sat down near her 
mother. 

“ I am so sorry. I am afraid you waited for me,” 
she said, bending towards her ; “ I really could n’t 
help it, mamma.” 

** No, I think it kindest to consider you irrespon- 
sible ; there is certainly an element of insanity in 
your exaggerated devotion to your work.” Mrs. 
Archinard smiled acidly, and Hilda, Odd thought, 
did look a little embarrassed now. He had ad- 
justed himself to the reality of the present, and was 
able to study her. The same Botticelli Madonna 
mouth, the same Gainsborough eyes; the skin of 
dazzling whiteness — an almost unnatural white — 
but she was evidently tired. 

Certainly her black gown looked strangely be- 
side Katherine’s velvet, Mrs. Archinard’s silk and 
laces. Odd saw that there was mud on the skirt, 
a very short skirt, and Hilda’s legs were very long. 
She had walked, then. His own paternal solici- 
tude struck him as amusing, and rather touching, 
as he glanced at her slim feet, to see with satis- 
93 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 

faction that wet boots had been replaced by patent- 
leather shoes — heelless little shoes. 

“ I am afraid you work too much, you tire your- 
self,” he said, for after her mother’s rebuff she had 
sunk back in her chair with a weary lassitude of 
pose. Hilda immediately sat up straightly, giving 
him an almost frightened glance. How unchanged 
the little face, though the cloud of her hair no longer 
framed it. Hilda’s hair was as smooth as her sister’s, 
only it was brushed straight back, and the soft 
blue-black coils were massed from ear to ear, and 
showed, in a coronet-like effect above her head, 
almost too much hair ; it emphasized the pale fra- 
gility of her look. 

“ Oh no, I am not tired,’’ she said, ** not particu- 
larly. I walked home, you see. I am very fond of 
walking.” 

Hilda is fond of such funny things,” said Kathe- 
rine, coming from the piano, “of walking in the 
mud and rain for instance. She is the most persist- 
ently, consistently energetic person I ever knew.” 
Katherine paused pleasantly as though for Hilda to 
speak, but Hilda said nothing and looked even more 
vague than before, almost dull in fact. 

“ Well, she has had no tea,” said Odd, “ and 
after mud and rain that is rather cruel, even as a 
punishment.” 

Again Hilda gave him the alarmed quick glance; 
his eyes were humorously kind, and she smiled a 
slight little smile* 

“ Some tea ! ” Katherine cried ; “ my poor Hilda, 
I ’m afraid it is hard-boiled by this time ” — she laid 


94 


KATHERINE 


her hand on the teapot — and almost cold. Shall I 
heat some more water, dear ? ” 

Oh ! don’t think of it, Katherine, it is almost 
dinner-time.” 

‘‘ Must I be off?” asked Odd, laughing. 

“ How absurd ; we don’t dine till eight,” Kathe- 
rine said. 

“It wasn’t a hint to me, then, Hilda?” Hilda 
looked helplessly distressed. 

“ A hint ? Oh no, no. How could you think 
that ? ” 

“ I was only joking. I did n’t really believe you 
so anxious to get rid of an old friend.” Odd, with 
some determination, crossed the room and sat down 
beside her. 

“ I want to see a great deal of you if you will let 
me. 

“ No one sees much of Hilda, not even her own 
mother,” said Mrs. Archinard from her sofa. “ It 
is terrible indeed to feel oneself a cumberer of the 
earth, unable to suffice to oneself, far less to others. 
With my failing eyesight I simply cannot read by 
lamplight, and there are three or four hours at this 
season when I am absolutely without resources. 
Yet even those hours Hilda cannot give me.” 

Hilda now looked so painfully embarrassed that 
Odd was perforce obliged, for very pity’s sake, to 
avert his eyes from her face. 

“ Ah, Mr. Odd,” Mrs. Archinard went on, “you 
do not know what that is. To lie in the gray dusk 
and watch one’s own gray, gray thoughts.” 

“ It must be very unpleasant,” Odd owned unwill- 
ingly, feeling that his character of old friend was 
95 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


being rather imposed upon ; this degree of intimacy 
was certainly unwarranted. 

“ Now, mamma, you usually have friends every 
afternoon,” said Katherine, in her pleasant, even 
voice. She was preparing some fresh tea. “You 
make me as well as Hilda feel a culprit.” 

“ No, my dear.” Mrs. Archinard’s deep sense of 
accumulated injury evidently got quite the better 
of her manners. “ No, my dear, you never could 
read aloud and never did. I never asked it of you. 
You are really occupied as a girl should be. At all 
events you fulfil your social duties. You see that 
people come to see me. As I cannot go out, as 
Hilda will not, I really don’t know what I should 
do were it not for you. And, as it is, no one came 
this afternoon until Mr. Odd made his welcome 
appearance.” 

“ But Mr. Odd came at five, and you always read 
till then.” Katherine’s voice was gently playful. 
Hilda had not said one word, and her expression 
seemed now absolutely dogged. 

“At this season, Katherine ! You forget that it 
is night by four ! And how a girl with any regard 
for her mother’s wishes can walk about the streets 
of Paris alone after that hour it passes my compre- 
hension to understand.” 

“ Do you care about bicycling, Mr. Odd ? ” The 
change was abrupt but welcome. “ Because I am 
going to the Bois to-morrow morning, and alone 
for once.” Katherine smiled at him over the kettle 
which she was lifting. “ Papa has deserted me.” 

“ I should enjoy it immensely. And you,” he 
looked at Hilda, “won’t you come?” 

96 


KATHERINE 


Oh, I can’t,” said Hilda, with a troubled look. 
“Thanks so much.” 

“ Oh no, Hilda can’t,” laughed Mrs. Archinard. 

“And where is the Captain off to ? ” queried 
Peter hastily. He felt that he would like to shake 
Mrs. Archinard. Hilda’s stubborn silence might 
certainly be irritating, and Odd had sympathy for 
parental claims and wishes, especially concerning the 
advisability of a beautiful girl walking in the streets 
at night unescorted, sacrificed to youthful conceit ; 
but Mrs. Archinard’s personality certainly weakened 
all claims, and her taste was as certainly atrocious. 

“ Papa,” said Katherine, pouring out the tea, “ is 
going to-morrow morning to the Riviera. Lucky 
papa ! ” Odd thought with some amusement of the 
£120 that constituted papa’s “ luck.” “ I have only 
been once to Monte Carlo, and I won such a lot. 
Only imagine how forty pounds turned my head. 
I revelled in hats and gloves fora whole year. Then 
we go to-morrow, Mr. Odd ? I have my own bicy- 
cle. I have kept it near the Porte Dauphine, and 
you can hire a very nice one at the sarne place.” 

“ May I call for you here at ten, then ? Will that 
suit you ? ” 

“ Very well.” Odd watched Katherine as she 
carried the tea and cake to her sister. Hilda gave 
a little start. 

“ O Katherine, how good of you ! I did n’t realize 
what you were doing.” 

“ It is you who are good, my pet,” said Katherine 
in a low, gentle voice. Peter thought it a pretty 
little scene. 

“ A great deal of latitude must be granted to the 

97 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


young person who invented that teapot/’ he said to 
Hilda. One must work hard to do anything in 
art, mustn’t one? A most lovely teapot, Hilda.” 

“ I am glad you like it.” Hilda smiled her thanks, 
but her eyes still expressed that distance and re- 
serve that showed no consciousness of the past, no 
intention of admitting it as a link to the present. 
She did not seem exactly shy, but her whole man- 
ner was passive — negative. Katherine probably 
thought that Mr. Odd had by this time realized the 
futility of an attempt to draw out the unresponsive 
artist, for she seated herself between Odd and the 
sofa, thus protecting Hilda from Mrs. Archinard’s 
severities and Odd from the ineffectual necessity for 
talking to Hilda. Odd thought that were Kathe- 
rine and Mrs. Archinard not there he might have 

come at ” Hilda, but the sense of ease Katherine 
brought with her was undeniable. She was charm- 
ingly mistress of herself, made him talk, appealed 
prettily to her mother, who even gave more than 
one melancholy laugh, and, with a tactful give and 
take, yet kept the reins of conversation well within 
her own hands. 

Odd found her a nice girl, but the undercurrent 
of his thought dwelt on Hilda, and at every gayety 
of Katherine’s, his eyes sought her sister’s face ; 
Hilda’s eyes were always fixed on Katherine, and 
she smiled a certain dumbly admiring smile. As he 
sat near her, he could see that the little black dress 
was very shabby. He could not have associated 
Hilda with real untidiness, and indeed the dress with 
its white linen cuffs and collar, its inevitable grace 
of severely simple outline, w^s neat to an almost 

98 


KATHERINE 


painful degree. Hilda’s artistic proclivities perhaps 
showed themselves in shiny seams and careful darns 
and patches. 

When he rose to go he took her hands again ; he 
hoped that his persistency did not make him appear 
rather foolish. 

I am sorry you won’t come to-morrow. May I 
hope for another day ? ” 

I can’t come to-morrow ” — there was a touch of 
self-defence in Hilda’s smile — “ but perhaps some 
other day. I should love to,” she finished rather 
abruptly. 

“ But you will be different — I will be different. 
We will both be changed,” repeated itself in Odd’s 
mind as he walked down the Rue Pierre Charron. 
Poor little child-voice ! how sadly it sounded. How 
true had been the prophecy. 

99 


CHAPTER III 



ETER ODD, at this epoch of his life, felt that 


Jl he was resting on his oars and drifting. He 
had spent his life in strenuous rowing. He had 
seen much, thought much, done much ; yet he had 
made for no goal, and had won no race ; how should 
he, when he had not yet made up his mind that 
racing for anything was worth while ? 

Perhaps the two years in Parliament had most 
closely savored of consciously applied contest, and 
in that contest Odd considered himself beaten, and 
its efforts as though they had never been. Every 
one had told him that to bring the student’s ideals 
into the political arena was to insure defeat ; one’s 
friends would consider a carefully discriminating 
honesty and broad-mindedness mere disloyal luke- 
warmness, foolish hair-splitting feebleness ; one’s 
enemies would rejoice and triumph in the impar- 
tiality of an opponent. Certainly he had been de- 
feated, and he could not see that his example had 
in any way been effectual. At all events, he had 
held to the ideals. 

His fine critical taste found even his own books 
but crude and partial expressions of still groping 
thoughts. His unexpressed intention, good indeed, 
if one might so call its indefiniteness, had been to 
make the world better for having lived in it ; better, 


100 


KATHERINE 


or at least wiser. But he doubted the saving power 
of his own sceptical utterances ; the world could not 
be saved by the balancings of a mind that saw the 
tolerant point of view of every question, a mind 
itself so unassured of results. A strong dash of 
fanaticism is necessary for success, and Odd had 
not the slightest flavor of fanaticism. Perhaps he 
had given a little pleasure in his more purely literary 
studies, and Peter thought that he would stick to 
them in the future, but he had put the future away 
from him just now. He had only returned from the 
great passivity of the Orient a few weeks ago, and 
its example seemed to denote drifting as the su- 
preme wisdom. No effort, no desire; a peaceful 
receptivity, a peaceful acceptance of the smiles or 
buffets of fate ; that was Odd's ideal — for the present. 
He was a little sick of everything. The Occidental's 
energy for combat was lulled within him, and the 
Occidental's individualistic tendencies seemed to 
stretch themselves in a long yawn expressive of an 
amused and tolerant observation free from striving; 
and, for an Occidental, this mood is dangerous. 
Odd also did a good deal of listening to very modern 
and very clever French talk. He knew many clever 
Frenchmen. He did not agree with all of them, 
but, as he was not sure of his own grounds for dis- 
agreement, he held his peace and listened smilingly. 
Certainly the exclusively artistic standpoint was a 
most comforting and absorbing plaything to fall 
back on. 

Peter's friends talked of the amusing and touching 
spectacle of the universe. The representation of 
each man's illusion on the subject, and the manner 
lOI 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


of that representation, were never-ceasing sources 
of interest. Peter also read a little at the Biblio- 
th^que Nationale, paid a few calls, dined out pretty 
constantly, and bicycled a great deal in the morn- 
ings with Katherine Archinard. She understood 
things well, and her taste was as sure and as delicate 
as even Odd could ask. Katherine had absorbed a 
great deal of culture during her wanderings, and it 
would have taken a long time for any one to find 
out that it was of a rather second-hand quality, and 
sought more for attainment than for enjoyment. 
Katherine talked with clever people and read clever 
reviews, and being clever herself, with a very acute 
critical taste, she knew with the utmost refinement 
of perception just what to like and just what to dis- 
like ; and as she tolerated only the very best, her 
liking gave value. Yet au fond Katherine did not 
really care even for the very very best. Her ap- 
preciation was negative. She excelled in a finely 
smiling, superior scorn, and could pick flaws in 
almost any one’s enjoyment, if she chose to do so. 
Katherine, however, was kind-hearted and tactful, 
and did not arouse dislike by displaying her clever- 
ness except to people who would like it. Enthusiasm 
was banal, and Katherine was not often required to 
feign where she did not feel it ; her very rigor and ex- 
clusiveness of taste implied an appreciation too high 
for expression ; but Katherine had no enthusiasm. 

Her rebellious and iconoclastic young energy 
amused Odd. He thought her rather pathetic in 
a way. There was a look of daring and revolt in 
her eye that pleased his lazy spirit. Meanwhile 
Hilda troubled him. 


102 


KATHERINE 


Would she never bicycle? Katherine, wheeling 
lightly erect beside him, gave the little shake of 
the head and shrug of the shoulders characteristic 
of her. She evidently found no fault with Hilda. 
Others might do so — the shrug implied that, 
implied as well that Katherine herself perhaps 
owned that her sister’s impracticable unreason gave 
grounds for fault-finding — but Hilda was near her 
heart. 

When could he see her ? That, too, seemed 
wrapped in the general cloud of vagueness, un- 
accountableness that surrounded Hilda. Odd called 
twice in the evening ; once to be received by Kathe- 
rine alone, Hilda was already in deshabille it seemed, 
and once to find not even Katherine ; she was dining 
out, and Miss Hilda in bed. In bed at nine ! 
“ Was she ill ? ” he asked of Taylor. Wilson had 
evidently accompanied the Captain. 

No wonder if she were, sir,” Taylor had replied, 
with a touch of the grievance in her tone that Hilda 
always seemed to arouse in those about her ; but 
no, she ’s only that tired ! ” and Odd departed with 
a deepened sense of Hilda’s wilful immolation. 
Katherine brought him home to lunch on several 
occasions after the bicycling, but Hilda was never 
there. She lunched at her studio. 

On a third call Hilda appeared, but only as he 
was on the point of going. She wore the same 
black dress, and the same look of unnatural 
pallor. 

Hilda,” said Odd, for amid these unfamiliar con- 
ditions he still used the familiar appellation, “ I must 
see the cause of all this.” 

103 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“Of what? ” Her smile was certainly the sweet 
smile he remembered. 

“ Of this unearthly devotion ; these white cheeks.” 

“ Hilda is naturally pale,” put in Mrs Archinard ; 
“ she has my skin. But, of course, now she is a 
ghost.” 

“ Well, I want to see the haunted studio. I want 
to see the masterpieces.” Odd spoke with a touch 
of gentle irony that did not seem to offend Hilda. 

“ You will see nothing either uncanny or unusual.” 

“Well, at all events, when can I come to see you 
in your studio ? ” The vague look crossed Hilda’s 
smile. 

“You see — I work very hard;” she hesitated, 
seemed even to cast a beseeching glance at Kathe- 
rine, standing near. Katherine was watching her. 

“ She is getting ready her pictures for the Champs 
de Mars. But, Hilda, Mr. Odd may come some 
morning.” 

“ Oh yes. Some morning. I thought you always 
bicycled in the morning. I wish you would come, 
it would be so nice to see you there ! ” she spoke 
with a gay and sudden warmth ; “ only you must 
tell me when to expect you. My studio must be 
looking nicely and my model presentable.” 

“ I will take Mr. Odd to-morrow,” said Katherine, 
“ he would never find his Avay.” 

“Thanks, that will be very jolly,” said Odd, 
conscious that an unescorted visit would have been 
more so, yet wondering whether Hilda alone might 
not be more disconcerting than Hilda aided and 
abetted by her sister. 

So the next morning he called for Katherine, and 
104 


KATHERINE 


they walked to a veritable nest of ateliers near the 
Place des Ternes, where they climbed interminable 
stairs to the very highest studio of all, and here, 
in very bare and business-like surroundings, they 
found Hilda. She left her easel to open the door 
to them. A red-haired woman was lying on a sofa 
in a far, dim corner, a vase of white flowers at her 
head. There was a big linen apron of butcher’s blue 
over the black dress, and Hilda looked very neat, 
less pallid, too, than Odd had seen her look as yet. 
Her skin had blue shadows under the chin and 
nose, and a blue shadow made a mystery beneath 
the long sweep of her eyebrows and about her 
beautiful eyes. But when she turned her head to 
the light, Odd saw that the lips were red and the 
cheeks freshly and faintly tinted. 

He was surprised by the picture on the big easel ; 
the teapot had not prepared him for it. A rather 
small picture, the figure flung to its graceful, lazy 
length, only a fourth life-size. It was a picture of 
elusive shadows, touched with warmer lights in its 
grays and greens. The woman’s half-hidden face 
was exquisite in color. The sweep of her pale 
gown, half lost in demi-tint, lay over her like the 
folded wings of a tired moth. The white flowers 
stood like dreams in the dreamy atmosphere. 

“ Hilda, I can almost forgive you.” Odd stood 
staring before the canvas ; he had put on his eye- 
glass. “ Really this atones.” 

“ Is n’t it wonderfully simple, wonderfully decora- 
tive ? ” said Katherine, “ all those long, sleepy lines. 
My clever little Hilda ! ” 

“ My clever, clever little Hilda ! ” Odd repeated, 
lOS 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


turning to look at the young artist. Her eyes met 
his with their wide, sweet gaze that said nothing. 
Hilda was evidently only capable of saying things 
on canvas. 

“ It is lovely.” 

You like it really ? ” 

^ “I really think it is about as charming a picture 

as I have seen a woman do. So womanly too.” 
Odd turned to Katherine, it was difficult not to 
merge Hilda in her art, not to talk about her talent 
as a thing apart from her personality : She ex- 
presses herself, she does n’t imitate.” 

Perhaps that is rather unwomanly,” laughed 
Katherine : “ a crawling imitativeness seems un- 
fortunately characteristic. Certainly Hilda has 
none of it. She has inspired me with hopes for my 
sex.” 

“ Really cleverer than Madame Morisot,” said 
Odd, looking back to the canvas, “ delightful as she 
is ! She could touch a few notes surely, gracefully ; 
Hilda has got hold of a chord. Yes, Hilda, you are 
an artist. Have you any others ? ” 

Hilda brought forward two. One was a small 
study of a branch of pink blossoms in a white porce- 
lain vase ; the other a woman in white standing at a 
window and looking out at the twilight. This last 
was, perhaps, the cleverest of the three ; the lines of 
the woman’s back, shoulder , perdUy astonish- 
ingly beautiful. 

“You are fond of dreams and shadows, are n’t 
you ? ” 

“ I have n’t a very wide range, but one can only 
try to do the things one is fitted for. I like all sorts 
io6 


KATHERINE 


of pictures, but I like to paint demi-tints and twi- 
lights and soft lamplight effects.” 

“ ‘ Car nous voulons la nuance encor — 
pas la couleur, rien que la nuance,' ” 

chanted Katherine. “ Hilda lives in dreams and 
shadows, I think, Mr. Odd, so naturally she paints 
them. ‘ V art cest la nature^ vue it travers un tem- 
perament. Excuse my spouting.” 

“ So your temperament is a stuff that dreams are 
made of. Well, Hilda, make as many as you can. 
Hello ! is that another old friend I see? ” On turn- 
ing to Hilda he had caught sight of a dachshund — 
rather white about the muzzle, but very luminous 
and gentle of eye — stretching himself from a nap 
behind the little stove in the corner. He came to- 
ward them with a kindly wag of the tail. 

“ Is this Palamon or Arcite?” 

A change came over Hilda’s face. 

“ That is Palamon ; poor old Palamon. Arcite 
fulfilled his character by dying first.” 

And Darwin and Spencer? ” 

Dead, too ; Spencer was run over.” 

“ Poor old Palamon ! Poor old dog ! ” Odd had 
lifted the dog in his arms, and was scratching the 
silky smooth ears as only a dog-lover knows how. 
Palamon’s head slowly turned to one side in an 
ecstasy of appreciation. Odd looked down at 
Hilda. Katherine was behind him. “ Poor Pala- 
mon, ‘ allone, withouten any companye.’ ” Hilda’s 
eyes met his in a sad, startled look, then she dropped 
them to Palamon, who was now putting out his 
tongue towards Odd’s face with grateful emotion. 

“Yes,” she said gently, putting her hand caress- 
107 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


ingly on the dog’s head ; her slim, cold fingers Just 
brushed Odd’s; “yes, poor Palamon.” She was 
silent, and there was silence behind them, for Kath- 
erine, with her usual good-humored tact, was ex- 
amining the picture. The model on the sofa 
stretched her arms and yawned a long, scraping 
yawn. Palamon gave a short, brisk bark, and looked 
quickly and suspiciously round the studio. Both 
Odd and Hilda laughed. 

“ But not ‘ allone,’ after all,” said Odd. “ Is he a 
great deal with you ? That is a different kind of 
company, but Palamon is the gainer.” 

“We must n’t judge Palamon by our own stand- 
ards,” smiled Hilda, “though highly civilized dogs 
like him don’t show many social instincts towards 
their own kind. He did miss Arcite though, at first, 
I am sure ; but he certainly is not lonely. I bring 
him here with me, and when I am at home he is 
always in my room. I think all the walking he gets 
is good for him. You see in what good condition 
he is.” 

Palamon still showing signs of restlessness over the 
yawn, Odd put him down. He was evidently on 
cordial terms with the model, for he trotted affably 
toward her, standing with a lazy, smiling wave of 
the tail before her, while she addressed him with 
discreetly low-toned, whispering warmth as ‘‘ Mon 
chou ! Mon hijou ! Mon petit lapin h la sauce 
blanche ! ” 

“ Don’t you get very tired working here all day ? ” 
Odd asked. 

“ Sometimes. But anything worth doing makes 
one tired, does n’t it ? ” 

io8 


KATHERINE 


**You take your art very seriously, Hilda?” 

“Sometimes — yes — I take it seriously.” Hilda 
smiled her slight, reserved smile. 

“ Well, I can’t blame you ; you really have some- 
thing to say.” 

“ Hilda, I am afraid we are becoming de trop, I 
must carry you off, Mr. Odd. Hilda’s moments are 
golden.” 

“ That is a sisterly exaggeration,” said Hilda. 
Had all her personality gone into her pictures? 
was she a self-centred little egotist ? Odd won- 
dered, as he and Katherine walked away together. 
Katherine’s warmly human qualities seemed par- 
ticularly consoling after the chill of the abstract one 
felt in Hilda’s studio. 


109 


CHAPTER IV 


“TEETER, she is a nice, a clever, a delightful 
jT girl,” said Mary Apswith. 

Mrs. Apswith sat in a bright little salon overlook- 
ing the Rue de la Paix. For her holiday week of 
shopping Peter’s hotel was not central enough, but 
Peter himself was at her command from morning 
till night. He stood before her now, his back to 
the flaming logs in the fireplace, looking alternately 
down at his boots and up at his sister. Peter’s face 
wore an amused but pleasant smile. Katherine 
must certainly be nice, clever, and delightful, to 
have won Mary, usually so slow in friendship. 

“ Whether she is deep — deeply good, I mean — I 
don’t know ; one can’t tell. But, at all events, she 
is sincere to the core.” Mary had called on the 
Archinards some days ago, and had seen Katherine 
every day since then. 

Mary’s stateliness had not become buxom. The 
fine lines of her face had lost their former touch of 
heaviness. Her gray hair — grayer than Peter’s — 
and fresh skin gave her a look of merely perfected 
maturity. Life had gone well with her ; everybody 
said that ; yet Mary knew the sadness of life. She 
had lost two of her babies, and sorrow had softened, 
ripened her. The Mary of ten years ago had not 
had that tender look in her eyes, those lines of sym- 
IIO 


KATHERINE 


pathetic sensibility about the lips. Her decisively 
friendly sentence was followed by a little sigh of 
disapprobation. 

“As for Hilda!” 

“As for Hilda?” 

“ I am disappointed, Peter. Yes ; we went to her 
studio this morning ; Katherine took me there ; 
Katherine’s pride in her is pretty. Yes ; I suppose 
the pictures are very clever, if one likes those rather 
misty things. They look as though they were painted 
in the back drawing-room behind the sofa 1 ” Peter 
laughed. “ I don’t pretend to know. I suppose au 
fond I am a Philistine, with a craving for a story on 
the canvas. I don’t really appreciate Whistler, so 
of course I have n’t a right to an opinion at all. But 
however clever they may be, I don’t think those 
pictures should fill her life to the exclusion of every- 
thing. The girl owes a duty to herself ; I don’t 
speak of her duty to others. I have no patience 
with Mrs. Archinard, she is simply insufferable ! 
Katherine’s patience with her is admirable ; but 
Hilda is completely one-sided, and she is not great 
enough for that. But she will fancy herself great 

before long. Lady told me that she was never 

seen with her sister — there is that cut off, you see — 
how natural that they should go out together ! Of 
course she will grow morbidly egotistic, people who 
never meet other people always do ; they fancy 
themselves grandly misunderstood. So unhealthy, 
too ! She looked like a ghost.” 

“Poor little Hilda! She probably fancies an 
artist’s mission the highest. Perhaps it is, Mary.” 

“Not in a woman’s case” — Mrs. Apswith spoke 
III 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 

with a vigorous decision that would have stamped 
her with ignominy in the eyes of the perhaps myth- 
ical New Woman; “woman’s art is never serious 
enough for heroics.” 

“ Perhaps it would be, if they would show a con- 
sistent heroism for it.” Peter opposed Mary for the 
sake of the argument, and for the sake of an old 
loyalty. Au fondh.^ agreed with her. 

“ A female Palissy would revolutionize our ideas 
of woman’s art.” 

“ A pleasant creature she would be ! Tearing up 
the flooring and breaking the chairs for firewood ! 
An abominable desecration of the housewifely in- 
stincts! I don’t know what Allan Hope will do 
about it,” Mary pursued. 

“ Ah ! That is an accepted fact, then ? ” 

“ Dear me, yes. Lady Mainwaring is very anxious 
for it. It shows what Allan’s steady persistency has 
accomplished. The child has n’t a penny, you know.” 

“ You think she ’d have him ? ” 

“ Of course she will have him. And a lucky girl 
she is for the chance ! But, before the definite ac- 
ceptance, she will, of course, lead him the usual 
dance ; it ’s quite the thing now among girls of that 
type. Individuality ; their own life to be lived, 
their Art — in capitals — to be lived for ; home, hus- 
band, children, degrading impediments. Such tire- 
some rubbish ! I am very sorry for poor Allan.” 
Peter studied his boots. 

“ Allan probably accounts for that general absent- 
mindedness I observed in her; perhaps Allan ac- 
counts for more than we give her credit for ; this 
desperate devotion to her painting, her last struggle 
112 


KATHERINE 


to hold to her ideal. Really the theory that she is 
badly in love explains everything. Poor child ! ” 
Why poor, Peter? Allan Hope is certainly the 
very nicest man I know, barring yourself and Jack. 
He has done more than creditably in the House, 
and now that he is already on the Treasury Bench, 
has only to wait for indefinite promotion. He is 
clever, kind, honest as the day. He will be an earl 
when the dear old earl dies, and that that is a pretty 
frame to the picture no one can deny. What more 
can a girl ask ? ” 

“ This girl probably asks some impossible dream. 
I ’m sorry for people who have n’t done dreaming.” 

“ Between you and me, Peter, I don’t think Hilda 
is really clever enough to do much dreaming — of the 
pathetic sort. Her eyes are clever ; she sees things 
prettily, and puts them down prettily ; but there is 
nothing more. She struck me as a trifle stupid — 
really dull, you know.” 

Odd shifted his position uncomfortably. 

“ That may be shyness, reserve, inability for self- 
expression.” He leaned his arm on the mantelpiece 
and studied the fire with a puzzled frown. That 
exquisite face must mean something.” 

‘‘ I don’t know. By the law of compensation 
Katherine has the brains, the heart, and Hilda the 
beauty. I did n’t find her shy. She seemed per- 
fectly mistress of herself. It may be a case of 
absorption in her love affair, as you say. I am not 
sure that he has asked her yet. He is a most modest 
lover.” 

Mary saw a great deal of Katherine during her 
stay, and her first impression was strengthened. 

8 113 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


Katherine shopped with her ; they considered 
gowns together, Katherine’s taste was exquisite, 
and the bonnets of her choice the most becoming 
Mrs. Apswith had ever worn. The girl was not 
above liking pretty things — that was already nice 
in her — for the girl was clever enough to pose in- 
difference. Mary saw at once that she was clever. 
Katherine was very independent, but very attentive. 
Her sincerity was charmingly gay, and not priggish. 
She said just what she thought; but she thought 
things that were worth saying. She made little 
display of learning, but one felt it — like the silk 
lining in a plain serge gown. She did not talk too 
much ; she made Mrs. Apswith feel like talking. 
Mary took her twice to the play with Peter and 
herself. Hilda was once invited and came. Odd 
sat in the back of the box and watched for the 
effect on her face of the clever play interpreted by 
the best talent of the Theatre Frangais. The quiet 
absorption of her look might imply much intelligent 
appreciation ; but Katherine’s little ripples of glad 
enjoyment, clever little thrusts of criticism, made 
Hilda’s silence seem peculiarly impassive, and while 
between the acts Katherine analyzed keenly, woke 
a scintillating sense of intellectual enjoyment about 
her in flashes of gay discussion, Hilda sat listening 
with that same smile of admiration that almost irri- 
tated Odd by its seeming acceptance of inability — 
inferiority. 

The smile, from its very lack of all self-reference, 
was rather touching ; and Mary owned that Hilda 
was “sweet,” but the adjective did not mitigate the 
former severity of judgment — that was definite. 

1 14 


KATHERINE 


When Mary went, she begged Katherine to ac- 
cept the prettiest gown Doucet could make her, and 
Katherine accepted with graceful ease and frankness. 
The gown was exquisite. Mary sent to Hilda a fine 
Braun photograph, which Hilda received with sur- 
prised delight, for she had done nothing to make 
Mrs. Apswith’s stay in Paris pleasant. She thought 
such kindness touching, and Katherine’s gown the 
loveliest she had ever seen. 

I15 


CHAPTER V 


M ary gone, the bicycling tete-h-tHes were re- 
sumed, and Odd, too, began to call more 
frequently at the houses where he met Katherine. 
They were bon camarades in the best sense of the 
term, and Peter found it a very pleasant sense. He 
realized that he had been lonely, and loneliness in 
his present d^soeuvr^e condition would have been in- 
tolerable. The melancholy of laziness could not 
creep to him while this girl laughed beside him. 
The frank, sympathetic relation — almost that of 
man to man — was untouched by the faintest infusion 
of sentiment ; delicious breeziness and freedom of 
intercourse was the result. Peter listened to Kath- 
erine, laughed at her sometimes, and liked her to 
laugh at him. He told her a good many of his 
thoughts; she criticised them, approved of them, 
encouraged him to action. But Odd felt his present 
contemplativeness too wide to be limited by any 
affirmation. He had never felt so little sure of any- 
thing nor so conscious of everything in general. 
Writing in such a mood seemed folly, and he con- 
tinued to drift. He still read in an objectless way 
at the Biblioth^que, hunting out old references, 
pleasing himself by a circuit through the points of 
view of all times. Katherine offered to help him, 
and in the morning he would bring her his notes to 

Ii6 


KATHERINE 


look over; her quick comprehension formed another 
link. He was very sorry for Katherine too. She 
had no taste for drifting. In her eye he read a dis- 
satisfaction, a thirst for wider vision, wider action, a 
restless impatience with the narrowness, the ineffec- 
tiveness of her lot, that made him muse on her prob- 
able future with a sense of pathos. Hilda’s wide 
gaze showed no such rebellion with the actual ; her 
art had filled it with a distant content that shut 
strife and the defeat of yearnings from her: or was 
it merely the placid consciousness of Allan Hope — 
a future assured and fully satisfactory? Under 
Katherine’s gayety there was a fierce beating of caged 
wings, and Odd fancied at times that, freed, the im- 
prisoned birds might be strong and beautiful. He 
fancied this especially when she played to him ; she 
played well, with surprising sureness of taste, and, 
as the winter came and it grew too cold for bicycling, 
Peter often spent the morning in listening to her. 
Mrs. Archinard did not appear until the afternoon 
in the drawing-room, and in the evenings he usually 
met her dining out or at some reception ; their inti- 
macy once noticed, they were invited together. 

Lady was especially anxious that Odd should 

have every opportunity for meeting her favorite. 

But with all this intimacy, to Peter’s consciousness 
thoroughly, paternally platonic, under all its daily 
interests and quiet pleasure lay a half-felt hurt, a 
sense of injury and loss. The little voice, seldom 
thought of during the last ten years, now repeated 
often : “ But you will be different ; I will be different ; 
we will both be changed.” 

Captain Archinard returned from the Riviera in 

iiy 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 

a temper that could mean but one thing ; he had 
gambled at Monte Carlo, and he had lost. He did 
not mention the fact in the family circle ; indeed, 
by a tacit agreement, money matters were never 
alluded to before Mrs. Archinard. Her years of 
successful invalidism had compelled even her hus- 
band’s acquiescence in the decision early arrived at 
by Hilda and Katherine : mamma must be spared 
the torments to which they had grown accustomed. 
But to Katherine the Captain freed his querulous 
soul, never to Hilda. There was a look in Hilda’s 
eyes that made the Captain very uncomfortable, 
very angry ; conscious of those cases of wonderful 
champagne, the races, the clubs, the boxes at the 
play, and all the infinite array of his wardrobe — a 
sad, wondering look. Katherine’s scoldings were 
far preferable, for Katherine was not so devilish 
superior to human weaknesses ; she had plenty of 
unpaid bills on her own conscience, and understood 
the necessities of an aristocratic taste. He and 
Katherine had their little secrets, and were mutually 
on the defensive. Hilda never criticised, to be 
sure, but her very difference was a daily criticism. 
The Captain thought his younger daughter rather 
dull ; Katherine, of finer calibre than her father, 
admired such dulness, and found some difficulty in 
stilling self-reproachful comparisons ; temperament, 
circumstance, made a comforting philosophy. And 
then Hilda’s art made things easy for Hilda ; with 
such a refuge, would she, Katherine, ask for more ? 
Katherine rather wondered now, after her father’s 
exasperated recountal of ill-luck, where papa had 
got the money to lose ; but papa on this point was 
ii8 


KATHERINE 


prudently reticent, and borrowed two one-hundred- 
franc notes from Peter while the latter waited in 
the drawing-room for Katherine one morning. 

Katherine and her father were making a round 
of calls one day, and the Captain stopped at his 
bank to cash a check. Katherine stood beside 
him, and, although he manoeuvred concealment with 
hand and shoulder, her keen eyes read the name. 

Her mouth was stern as they walked away — the 
Captain had folded the notes and put them in his 
pocket. 

A good deal of money that, papa.’' 

“ I suppose I owe twice as much to my tailor,” 
Captain Archinard replied, with irritation. 

** Has Mr. Odd lent you money before this? ” 

“ I really don’t know that Mr. Odd’s affairs — or 
mine — are any business of yours, Katherine.” 

“Yours certainly are, papa. When a father puts 
his daughter in a false position, his affairs decidedly 
become her business.” 

“ What rubbish, Katherine. Better men than 
Odd have been glad to give me a lift. I can’t see 
that Odd has been ill-used. He is rolling in 
money.” 

“ I don’t quite believe that, papa. Allersley is 
not such a rich property. But it is not of Mr. 
Odd’s ill-usage I complain, it is of mine ; for if this 
borrowing goes on, I hardly think I can continue 
my relations with Mr. Odd. It would rather look 
like — decoying.” 

The Captain stopped and fixed a look of futile 
dignity on his daughter. 

“ That ’s a strange word for you to use, Katherine. 

1 19 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


I would horsewhip the man who would suggest it. 
Odd is a gentleman.” 

Decidedly. I did not speak of his point of view 
but of mine. All frankness of intercourse between 
us is impossible if you are going to sponge on him.” 

“ Katherine ! I can’t allow such impertinence ! 
Outrageous ! It really is ! Sponge ! Can’t a man 
borrow a few paltry hundreds from another without 
exposing himself to such insulting language ? — es- 
pecially as Odd is to become my son-in-law, I sup- 
pose. He is always hanging about you.” 

That is what I meant, papa.” Katherine’s tone 
was icy. ‘‘Your suppositions were apparent to me, 
you drain Mr. Odd on the strength of them. Bor- 
row from any one else you like as much as you can 
get, but, if you have any self-respect, you won’t bor- 
row from Mr. Odd in the hope that I will marry him.” 

“ Devilish impertinent ! Upon my word, devilish 
impertinent ! ” the Captain muttered. He drew out 
his cigar-case with a hand that trembled. Kath- 
erine’s bitter look was very unpleasant. 

Katherine expected Odd the next morning ; he 
was reading a manuscript to her, and would come 
early. 

She was waiting for him at ten. She had put on 
her oldest dress. The severe black lines, a silk sash, 
knotted at the side, suggested a soutane — the slim 
buckled shoes with their square tips carried out the 
monastic effect, and Katherine’s strong young face 
was cold and stern. 

“ Shall we put off our work for a little while? I 
want to speak to you,” she said, after Odd had come, 
and greetings had passed between them. 

120 


KATHERINE 


“ Shall we ? You have been too patient all along, 
Miss Archinard.” Odd smiled down at her as he 
held her hand. ‘‘You make me feel that I have 
been driving you — arrantly egotistic.” 

“No; I like our work immensely, as you know.” 
Katherine remained standing by the fireplace. She 
leaned her arm on the mantelpiece, and turned her 
head to look directly at him. “ I am not at all happy 
this morning, Mr. Odd.” Odd’s kind eyes showed 
an almost boyish dismay. 

“What is it? Can I help you?” His tone was 
all sympathetic anxiety and friendly warmth. 

“ No ; just the contrary. Mr. Odd, I am ashamed 
that you should have seen the depths of our poverty. 
It is not a poverty one can be proud of. Poverty 
to be honorable must work, and must not borrow.” 

Odd flushed. 

“You exaggerate,” he said, but he liked her for 
the exaggeration. 

“ I did not know till yesterday that papa owed to 
you his Riviera trip.” 

“ Really, Katherine” — he had not used her name 
before, it came now most naturally with this new 
sense of intimacy — “you mustn’t misunderstand, 
misjudge your father. He could n’t work ; his life 
has unfitted him for it ; it would be a false pride 
that would make him hesitate to ask an old friend 
for a loan ; an old friend so well able to lend as I 
am. You women judge these things far too loftily.” 
And Peter liked her for the loftiness. 

“ Would you mind telling me how much you lent 
him last time ? I was with him when he cashed the 
check. I saw the name, not the amount.” 

I2I 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


** It was nothing of any importance,” said Odd 
shortly. He exaggerated now. The Captain had 
told him that the furniture would be seized unless 
some creditors were satisfied, and, with a very 
decided hint as to the inadvisability of another trip 
for retrievement to the Riviera, Peter had given him 
the money, ten thousand francs ; a sum certainly of 
importance, for Odd was no millionaire. 

Katherine looked hard at him. 

“You won’t tell me because you want to spare 
me.” 

“ My dear Katherine, I certainly want to spare 
you anything that would add a straw’s weight to 
your distress ; you have no need, no right to shoul- 
der this. It is your father’s affair — and mine. You 
must not give it another thought.” 

“ That is so easy ! ” Katherine clenched her hand 
on the mantelpiece. She was not given to vehe- 
mence of demonstration ; the little gesture showed a 
concentration of bitter rebellion. Odd, standing 
beside her, put his own hand over hers ; patted it 
soothingly. 

“ It ’s rather hard on me, you know, a slur on my 
friendship, that you should take a merely conven- 
tional obligation so to heart.” 

Katherine now looked down into the fire. 

“Take it to heart? What else have I had on 
my heart for years and years ? It is a mere varia- 
tion on the same theme, a little more poignantly 
painful than usual, that is all ! What a life to lead. 
What a future to look forward to. I wonder what 
else I shall have to endure.” Odd had never seen 
her before in this mood of fierce hopelessness. 

122 


KATHERINE 


“ Our poverty has poisoned everything, everything, 
I have had no youth, no happiness. Every moment 
of forgetfulness means redoubled keenness of gnaw- 
ing anxiety. Debts! Duns I harassing, sordid cares 
that drag one down. Mr. Odd, I have had to coax 
butchers and bakers ; I have had to plead with hor- 
rible men with documents of all varieties I I have 
had to pawn my trinkets, and all with surface 
gayety ; everything must be kept from mamma, 
and papa’s extravagance is incorrigible.” 

Odd was all grave amazement, grave pity, and 
admiration. 

“ You are a brave woman, Katherine.” 

“No, no; I am not brave. I am frightened — 
frightened to death sometimes. I see before me 
either a hideous struggle with want or. — a mariage 
de convenance, I have none of the classified, pigeon- 
holed knowledge one needs nowadays to become a 
teaching drudge, and I can’t make up my mind to 
sell myself, though, in spite of my lack of beauty and 
lack of money, that means of escape has often pre- 
sented itself. I have had many offers of marriage. 
Only I can'ty 

Odd was silent under the stress of a new thought, 
an entirely new thought. 

“ For Hilda I have no fear,” Katherine continued, 
still speaking with the same steady quiet voice, still 
looking into the fire. “ In the past her art has ab- 
sorbed and protected her, and her future is assured. 
She will marry a good husband.” A flash as of 
Hilda’s beauty crossed the growing definiteness 
of Peter’s new thought. That old undoing, that 
mirage of beauty ; he put it aside with some self- 
123 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


disgust, feeling, as he did so, a queer sense of imper- 
sonality as though putting away himself as he put 
away his weakness. He seemed to contemplate 
himself from an outside aloofness of observation. 
The trance-like feeling of the illusion of all things 
which he had felt more than once of late made him 
hold more firmly to the tonic thought of a fine com- 
mon-sense. 

“ Of course, mamma will be safe when Hilda is 
Lady Hope,’' Katherine said ; “ perhaps I shall be 
forced to accept the same charity.” Her voice broke 
a little, and she turned the sombre revolt of her look 
on Peter ; her eyes were full of tears. 

“ Katherine,” he said, “will you marry me?” 

Odd, five minutes before, had not had the remot- 
est idea that he would ask Katherine Archinard to 
be his wife. Yet one could hardly call the sudden 
decision that had brought the words to his lips, im- 
pulsive. While Katherine spoke, the bitter struggle 
of the fine young life, surely meant for highest 
things ; the courage of the cheerfulness she never 
before had failed in ; the pride of that repulsion for 
the often offered solution to her difficulties — a solu- 
tion many women would have accepted with a sense 
of the inevitable — became admirably apparent to 
Odd. Their mutual sympathy and good-fellowship 
and, almost unconsciously, Hilda’s assured future — 
Allan Hope — had defined the thought. He felt 
none of that passion which, now that he looked back 
on it, made of the miserable year of married life that 
followed but the logical retribution of its reckless 
and wilful blindness. The very lack of passion now 
seemed an added surety of better things. His life 
124 


KATHERINE 


with Katherine could count on all that his life with 
Alicia had failed in. He did not reason on that un- 
excited sense of impersonality and detachment. He 
would like her to accept him. He would like to help 
this fine, proud young creature ; he would like sym- 
pathetic companionship. He was sure of that. He 
had not surprised Katherine ; she had seen, as clearly 
as he now saw, what Peter Odd would do. She had 
not exactly intended to bring him to a realization of 
this by the morning’s confession, for on the whole 
Katherine had been perfectly sincere in all that she 
had said, but she felt that she could rely on no better 
opportunity. Now she only turned her head towards 
him, without moving from her position before the 
fireplace. Katherine never took the trouble to act. 
She merely aimed at the most advantageous line of 
conduct and let taste and instinct lead her. Her 
taste now told her that quiet sincerity was very suit- 
able ; she felt, too, a most sincere little dash of 
proud hesitation. 

“ Are you generously offering me another form of 
charity, Mr. Odd? My distress was not conscious 
of an appeal.” 

You know your own value too well, Katherine, 
to ask me that, /appeal.” 

“ Yet the apropos of your offer makes me smart. 
Another joy of poverty. One can’t trust.” 

“ It was apropos because a man who loves you 
would not see you suffer needlessly.” Peter, too, 
was sincere ; he did not say “ loved. 

‘‘ Shall I let you suffer needlessly ? asked Kathe- 
rine, smiling a little. ‘‘ I sha’n’t, if that implies that 
you love me.” 


125 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“ Suppose I do. And suppose I stand on my dig- 
nity. Pretend to distrust your motives. Refuse to 
be married out of pity?” 

That sort of false dignity would n’t suit you ; 
you have too much of the real.” 

“ Would you be good to me, Mr. Odd?” 

Very, very good, Katherine.” 

Odd took her hand and kissed it, and Katherine’s 
smile shone out in all its frank gayety. “ I think 
I can make you happy, dear.” 

I think you can, Mr. Odd.” 

** You must manage ^ Peter ’ now.” 

** I think you can, Peter,” Katherine said obedi- 
ently. 

‘^And Katherine — I would not have dared say 
this before, you would have flung it back at me as 
bribery — but I can give you weapons.” 

‘‘Yes, I shall be able to fight now.” She looked 
up at him with her charming smile. “ And you will 
help me, you must fight too. You must be great, 
Peter, great, / ” 

“ With such a fiery little engine throbbing beside 
my laggard bulk, I shall probably be towed into all 
sorts of combats and come off victorious.” 

They sat down side by side on the sofa. Kathe- 
rine was a delightfully comfortable person ; no 
change, but a pleasant development of relation 
seemed to have occurred. 

“You won’t expect any flaming protestations, 
will you, Katherine,” said Peter ; “ I was never good 
at that sort of thing.” 

“ Did you never flame, then ? ” 

“ I fancy I flamed out in about two months — a 
126 


KATHERINE 


long time ago ; that is about the natural life of the 
feeling.” 

“ And you bring me ashes,” said Katherine, rally- 
ing him with her smile. 

You must n’t tease me, Katherine,” said Peter. 
He found her very dear, and kissed her hand again. 
127 


/ 


Part II 


HILDA. 


CHAPTER I 


** TTTELL, Hilda, we have some news for you ! ” 
V V With these words, spoken in the triumphant 
tone of the news-breaker, the Captain greeted his 
daughter as she came into the drawing-room at half- 
past six. Odd had been paying his respects to his 
future parents-in-law, and was sitting near Mrs. 
Archinard’s sofa. He rose to his feet as Hilda en- 
tered and looked at her, smiling a trifle nervously. 

“ Guess what has happened, my dear,” said the 
Captain, whose good humor was apparent, while 
Mrs. Archinard murmured, *^Ske would never guess. 
Hilda, only look at your hat in the mirror.” It was 
windy, and Hilda’s shabby little hat was on the back 
of her head. 

“What must I guess? Is it about you?” she 
asked, turning her sweet bewildered eyes from Odd 
to her father, to her mother, and back to Odd again. 

“Yes, about me and another person.” 

“ You are going to marry Katherine ! ” Her eyes 
dilated and their sweetness deepened to a smile ; 
“ you are going to marry Katherine, that must be it.” 

“ That is it, Hilda. Congratulate me.” He took 
her hands in his and kissed her. “ Welcome me, 
and tell me you are glad.” 

“ Oh ! I am very glad. I welcome you. I con- 
gratulate you ! ” 

131 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“ You will like your brother?” 

“ A brother is dearer than a friend, and you have 
always been a friend, have n’t you, Mr. Odd? ” 

“ Always, always, Hilda ; I did n’t know that you 
realized it.” 

“ Did you realize it ? ” 

“ Did I, my dear Hilda ! I did, I do, I always 
will.” Hilda’s face seemed subtly irradiated. Her 
listless look of pallor had brightened wonderfully. 
No one could have said that the lovely face was dull 
with this sudden change upon it. Peter felt that 
he himself was grave in comparison. 

And I am going to claim all a brother’s rights 
immediately, Hilda.” 

“ What are a brother’s rights? ” 

“ I am going to look after you, to scold you, to 
see you don’t overwork yourself.” 

“ I give you leave, but you must n’t presume too 
much on the new rights.” 

Ah ! but I have old ones as well.” 

“ You must n’t be tyrannical ! ” she still laughed 
gently as she withdrew her hands ; “ I must go and 
see Katherine.” 

“ Yes, go and dress now, Hilda.” Mrs. Archinard 
spoke from the sofa, having watched the scene with 
a slight air of injury ; Hilda’s unwonted gayety con- 
stituted a certain grievance. Mr. Odd dines with 
us, and I really can’t bear to see you in that cos- 
tume. The skirt especially is really ludicrous, my 
dear. I am glad that I don’t see you walking 
through the streets in it.” 

Hilda knows that her feet bear showing,” re- 
marked the Captain, crossing his own with com- 
132 


HILDA 


placency ; “ she has her mother’s foot in size and 
mine in make — the Archinard foot ; narrow, arched 
instep, and small heel. 

Really, Charles, I think the Maxwells will bear 
the comparison ! ” Mrs. Archinard, though she 
smiled, looked distinctly distressed. 

Hilda found her sister before the long mirror 
in her room, Taylor fastening the nasturtium velvet. 
Katherine always had a commanding air, and it was 
quite regally apparent to-night; all things seemed 
made to serve her, and Taylor’s crouching attitude 
symbolic. 

Hilda put her arms around her neck. 

“ My dear, dear Kathy, I am so glad ! To think 
that good things do come true ! ” 

“ You like my choice, pet ? ” 

“Ai? one else would have done,” cried Hilda; 
“ he is the only man I ever saw whom I could have 
thought of for you. Why, Katherine, from that 
first day when you told me you had met him at the 
dinner, I knew it would happen.” 

“ Yes, I certainly felt a prophetic sense of pro- 
prietorship from the first,” Katherine owned mus- 
ingly. She looked over her sister’s shoulder at the 
fine outline of her own head and neck in the glass. 

Are n’t you rather splashed and muddy, pet ? ” 
Poor people can’t afford an affection that puts their 
velvet gowns in danger. There, I must n’t rumple 
my lace.” 

‘T have n’t hurt, have I ? ” Hilda stood back 
hastily. “I forgot, I am rather muddy. And, 
Katherine, you will help one another so much ; 
that makes it so ideal.” 


133 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


Idealistic little Hilda ! ” 

But that is evident, is n’t it? You with all 
your energy and cleverness and general sanity^ 
and he so widely sympathetic that he is a bit 
impersonal. I mean that he doubts himself because 
he doubts everything rather; he sees how relative 
everything is ; he probably thinks too much ; I am 
sure that is dangerous. You will make him act.” 

“ I am to be the concrete to his abstract. He 
certainly does lack energy. I wonder if even I 
shall be able to prod him into initiative.” 

Katherine patted down the fine old lace that 
edged her bodice, and looked a smiling question 
from her own reflection in the mirror to her sister. 
“ Suppose I fail to arouse him.” 

“ You will understand him. He will have some- 
thing to live for; that is what he needs. He won’t 
be able to say, ‘ Is it worth while?’ ahout your hap- 
piness. As for initiative, you will probably have 
to have that for both. After all, he has made his 
name and place. He has the nicest kind of fame ; 
the more apparent sort made up by the admiration 
of mediocrities isn’t half as nice.” 

Ah, pet, you are an intellectual aristocrat. My 
/>dU is coarser. I like the real thing ; the donkey’s 
brayings make a noise, and one must take the 
whole world with all its donkeys conscious of one, 
to be famous. I like noise.” Katherine smiled as 
she spoke, and Hilda smiled, too, a little smile of 
humorous comprehension, for she did not take 
Katherine in this mood at all seriously. She was as 
stanch in her belief of Katherine’s ideals as she 
was in sticking to her own. 

134 


HILDA 


“ We will be married in March,” said Katherine, 
pausing before her dressing-table to put on her 
rings — a fine antique engraved gem and a splendid 
opal. “You may go, Taylor; and Taylor, you 
may put out my opera-cloak after dinner. I think, 
Hilda, I will go to the opera ; papa has a box. He 
and I and Peter might care about dropping in for 
the last two acts. You don’t care to come, do you ? ” 

“ Well, mamma expects me to read to her ; it ’s 
a charming book, too,” added Hilda, with tactful 
delicacy. 

“ Well, I shall envy you your quiet evening. I 
can’t ask Peter to spend his here in the bosom of 
my family. Yes, March, I think, unless I decide on 
making that round of visits in England ; that would 
put it off for a month. I hope the ravens will fetch 
me a trousseau — for I don’t know who else will.” 

“ I shall have quite a lot by that time, Katherine. 
I have n’t heard from the dealer in London yet, but 
those two pictures will sell, I hope. And, at all 
events, with the other things, you know, I shall have 
about a hundred pounds.” 

Katherine flushed a little when Hilda spoke of 
“ other things,” and looked round at her sister. 

“ I hate to think of taking the money, Hilda.” 

“ My dear, why should you ? Except, of course 
— the debts,” Hilda sighed deeply : “ but I think 
on this occasion you have a right to forget them.” 
Katherine’s flush perhaps showed a consciousness 
of having forgotten the debts on many occasions 
less pressing. 

“ I meant, in particular, taking the money from 
you.” 


135 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


Hilda opened her wide eyes to their widest. 

“ Kathy ! as if it were not my pleasure ! my joy ! 
I am lucky to be able to get it for you. Can you 
get a trousseau for that much, Kathy ? ” 

‘‘ Well, linen, yes. I don’t care how little I get, 
but it must be good — good lace. I shall manage ; 
I don’t care about gowns, I can get them afterwards. 
Peter, I know, will be an indulgent husband.” A 
pleasant little smile flickered across Katherine’s 
lips. He w a dear! I only hope, pet, that you 
will be able to hold on to the money. Don’t let 
the duns worry it out of you ! ” The weary, pallid 
look came to Hilda’s face. 

I ’ll try, Kathy dear. I ’ll do my very best.” 

“My precious Hilda! You need not tell me 
that! Run quickly and dress, dear, it must be 
almost dinner-time. What have you to wear? 
Shall I lend you anything?” 

“ Why, you forgot my gray silk ! My fichu ! In- 
sulting Kathy ! ” 

“ So I did ! And you look deliciously pretty in 
that dress, though she did make a fiasco of the 
back; let the fichu come well down over it. You 
really should n’t indulge your passion for petites 
couturi^reSy child. It does n’t pay.” 

136 


CHAPTER II 


O DD climbed the long flight of stairs that led to 
Hilda’s studio. The concierge below at the 
entrance to the court had looked at him with the 
sourness common to her class, as she stood spa- 
ciously in her door. The gentleman had, evidently, 
definite intentions, for he had asked her no ques- 
tions, and Madame Prinet felt his independence as 
a slur upon her Cerberus qualifications. 

Odd was putting into practice his brotherly prin- 
ciples. He had spent the morning with Katherine 
— the fifth morning since their engagement — and 
time hanging unemployed and heavy on his hands 
this afternoon, a visit to Hilda seemed altogether 
desirable. It really behoved him to solve Hilda’s 
dubious position and, if possible, help her to a more 
normal outlook ; he felt the task far more feasible 
since that glimpse of gayety and confidence. In- 
deed he was quite unconscious of Madame Prinet’s 
suspicious observation as he crossed the court, and 
the absorption in his pleasant duty held his mind 
while he wound up the interminable staircase. 

His knock at Hilda’s door — there was no mis- 
taking it, for a card bearing her name was neatly 
nailed thereon — was promptly answered, and Odd 
found himself face to face with a middle-aged maiden 

137 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


of the artistic type with which Paris swarms ; thin, 
gray-haired, energetic eyes behind eyeglasses, and a 
huge palette on her arm, so huge that it gave Odd 
the impression of a misshapen table and blocked 
the distance out with its brave array of color. 
Over the lady's shoulder. Odd caught sight of a 
canvas of heroic proportions. 

“ Oh ! I thought it was the concierge,” said the 
artist, evidently disappointed ; “ have you come to 
the right door? I don’t think I know you.” 

“ No ; I don’t know you,” Odd replied, smiling 
and casting a futile glance around the studio, now 
fully revealed by the shifting of the palette to a 
horizontal position. 

“ I expected to find Miss Archinard. Are you 
working with her ? Will she be back presently ? ” 

The gray-haired lady smiled an answering and 
explanatory smile. 

“ Miss Archinard rents me her studio in the after- 
noon. She only uses it in the morning ; she is never 
here in the afternoon.” 

Odd felt a huge astonishment. 

“ Never here ? ” 

No ; can I give her any message ? I shall prob- 
ably see her to-morrow if I come early enough.” 

Oh no, thanks. Thanks very much.” He real- 
ized that to reveal his dismay would stamp Hilda 
with an unpleasantly mysterious character. 

^‘I shall see her this evening — at her mother’s. 
I am sorry to have interrupted you.” 

“ Oh ! Don’t mention it ! ” The gray-haired lady 
still smiled kindly ; Peter touched his hat and de- 
scended the stairs. Perhaps she worked in a large 

138 


HILDA 

atelier in the afternoon ; strange that she had never 
mentioned it. 

Madame Prinet, who had followed the visitor to 
the foot of the staircase and had located his errand, 
now stood in her door and surveyed his retreat with 
a fine air of impartiality ; people who consulted her 
need not mount staircases for nothing. 

“ Monsieur did not find Mademoiselle.” 

Odd paused ; he certainly would ask no questions 
of the co^ncirge, but she might, of her own accord, 
throw some light on Hilda’s devious ways. 

“ No ; I had hoped to find her. Mademoiselle 
was in when I last called with her sister. I did not 
know that she went out every afternoon.” 

Odd thought this tactful, implying, as it did, that 
Miss Archinard’s friends were not in ignorance of 
her habits. 

Every afternoon, monsieur ; elle et son chieny 

“ Ah, indeed ! ” Odd wished her good day and 
walked off. He had stumbled upon a mystery only 
Hilda herself might divulge : it might be very simple, 
and yet a sense of anxiety weighed upon him. 

At five he went to call on a pleasant and pretty 
woman, an American, who lived in the Boulevard 
Haussmann. He was to dine with the Archinards, 
and Katherine had said she might meet him at Mrs. 
Pope’s ; if she were not there by five he need not 
wait for her. She was not there, and Mr. Pope took 
possession of him on his entrance and led him into 
the library to show him some new acquisitions in 
bindings. Mrs. Pope was not a grass widow, and her 
husband, a desultory dilettante, was always in evi- 
dence in her graceful, crowded salon. He was a very 

139 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


tall, thin man, with white hair and a mild, almost 
timid manner, dashed with the collector’s eagerness. 

Now, Mr. Odd, I have a treasure here ; really a 
perfect treasure. A genuine Grolier ; I captured it 
at the La Hire sale. Just look here, please ; come 
to the light. Is n’t that a beauty ? ” 

Mrs. Pope, after a time, came and captured Peter ; 
she did not approve of the hiding of her lion in the 
library. She took him into the drawing-room, where 
a great many people were drinking tea and talking, 
and he was passed dexterously from group to group ; 
Mrs. Pope, gay and stout, shuffling the pack and 
generously giving every one a glimpse of her trump. 
It was a fatiguing process, and he was glad to find 
himself at last in Mrs. Pope’s undivided possession. 
He was sitting on a sofa beside her, talking and 
drinking a well-concocted cup of tea, when a picture 
on the opposite wall attracted his attention. He 
put down the cup of tea and put up his eyeglasses 
to look at it. A woman in a dress of Japanese blue, 
holding a paper fan ; pink azaleas in the foreground. 
The decorative outline and the peculiar tonality 
made it unmistakable. He got up to look more 
closely. Yes, there was the delicate flowing sig- 
nature : “ Hilda Archinard.” 

He turned to Mrs. Pope in pleased surprise. 

“ I did n’t know that Hilda had reached this degree 
of popularity. You are very lucky. Did she give 
it to you ? ” 

Katherine’s engagement was generally known, 
and Mrs. Pope reproached herself for having failed 
to draw Mr. Odd’s attention before this to the work 
of his future sister. 

140 


HILDA 


Oh no ; she is altogether too distinguished a 
little person to give away her pictures. That was 
in the Champs de Mars last year. I bought it. The 
two others sold as well. I believe she sells most of 
her things ; for high prices, too. Always the way, 
you know ; a starving genius is allowed to starve, 
but material success comes to a pretty girl who 
does n’t need it. Katherine is so well known in 
Paris that Hilda’s public was already made for her; 
there was no waiting for the appreciation that is her 
due. Her work is certainly charming.” 

Peter felt a growing sense of anxiety. He could 
not share Mrs. Pope’s feeling of easy pleasantness. 
Hilda did need it. Certainly there was nothing 
pathetic in doing what she liked best and making 
money at it. Yet he wondered just how far Hilda’s 
earnings helped the family ; kept the butcher and 
baker at bay. With a new keenness of conjecture 
he thought of the black serge dress ; somewhere 
about Hilda’s artistic indifference there might well 
lurk a tragic element. Did she not really care to 
wear the amethyst velvets that her earnings per- 
haps went to provide? The vague distress that 
had never left him since his first disappoint- 
ment at the Embassy dinner, that the afternoon’s 
discovery at the atelier had sharpened, now became 
acute. 

“ I always think it such a pretty compensation of 
Providence,” said Mrs. Pope, gracefully anxious to 
please, “ that all the talent that Hilda Archinard 
expresses, puts on her canvas, is more personal in 
Katherine ; is part of herself as it were, like a per- 
fume about her.” 

141 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


Yes/’ said Odd rather dully, not particularly 
pleased with the comparison. 

“ She is such a brilliant girl,” Mrs. Pope added, 
“ such a splendid character. I can’t tell you how it 
delighted me to hear that Katherine had at last 
found the rare some one who could really appreciate 
her. It strengthened my pet theory of the funda- 
mental fitness of things.” 

“Yes,” Odd repeated, so vaguely that Mrs. Pope 
hurriedly wondered if she had been guilty of bad 
taste, and changed the subject. 

When Peter reached the Archinards’ at half-past 
six that evening, he found the Captain and Mrs. 
Archinard alone in the drawing-room. 

“ Hilda not in yet? ” he asked. His anxiety was 
so oppressive that he really could not forbear open- 
ing the old subject of grievance. Indeed, Odd 
fancied that in Mrs. Archinard’s jeremiads there was 
an element of maternal solicitude. That Hilda 
should voluntarily immolate herself, have no pretty 
dresses, show herself nowhere — these facts perhaps 
moved Mrs. Archinard as much as her own neglected 
condition. At least, so Peter charitably hoped, feel- 
ing almost cruel as he deliberately broached the pain- 
ful subject. 

Mrs. Archinard now gave a dismal sigh, and the 
Captain shook his head impatiently as he put down 
Le Temps. 

Odd went on quite doggedly — 

“I didn’t know that Hilda sold her pictures. 
I saw one of them at Mrs. Pope’s this after- 
noon.” 

There could certainly be no indiscretion in the 
142 


HILDA 


statement, for Mrs. Pope herself had mentioned the 
fact of Hilda’s success as well known. Indeed, 
although the Captain’s face showed an uneasy little 
change, Mrs. Archinard’s retained its undisturbed 
pathos. 

^‘Yes,” she said, ^‘oh yes, Hilda has sold several 
things, I believe. She certainly needs the money. 
We are not rich people, Peter.” Mrs. Archinard had 
immediately adopted the affectionate intimacy of the 
Christian name. “ And we could hardly indulge 
Hilda in her artistic career if, to some extent, she 
did not help herself. I fancy that Hilda makes few 
demands on her papa’s purse, and she must have 
many expenses. Models are expensive things, I 
hear. I cannot say that I rejoice in her success. It 
seems to justify her obstinacy — makes her independ- 
ent of our desires — our requests.” 

Odd felt that there was a depth of selfish igno- 
rance in these remarks. The Captain’s purse he 
knew by experience to be very nearly mythical, and 
the Captain’s expression at this moment showed to 
Peter’s sharpened apprehension an uncomfortable 
consciousness. Peter was convinced that, far from 
making demands on papa’s purse, Hilda had replen- 
ished it, and further conjectures as to Hilda’s ego- 
tistic one-sidedness began to shape themselves. 

And a very lucky girl .she is to be able to make 
money so easily,” the Captain remarked, after a 
pause. “ By Jove ! I wish that doing what pleased 
me most would give me a large income ! ” and the 
Captain, who certainly had made most conscientious 
efforts to fulfil his nature, and had, at least, tried to 
do what most pleased him all his life long, and with 

143 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


the utmost energy, looked resentfully at his narrow 
well-kept finger-nails. 

“ Does she work all day long at her studio ? ’ 
Peter asked, conscious of a certain hesitation in his 
voice. The mystery of Hilda’s afternoon absences 
would now be either solved or determined. It was 
determined — definitely. There was no shade of 
suspicion in Mrs. Archinard’s sighing, “ Dear me, 
yes! ” or in the Captain’s, “ From morning till night. 
Wears herself out.” 

Hilda, all too evidently, had a secret. 

“ She ought to go to two studios, it would tire 
her less. Her own half the day, and a large atelier 
the other.” Assurance might as well be made 
doubly sure. 

Hilda left Julian’s a long time ago. She has 
lived in her own place since then, really lived there. 
I have n’t seen it ; of course I could not attempt the 
stairs. Katherine tells me there are terrible stairs. 
Most shockingly unhealthy life she leads, I think, 
and most, most inconsiderate.” 

At the dinner-table Odd knew that Hilda had 
only him to thank for the thorough “heckling” she 
received at the hands of both her parents. Her 
silence, with its element of vacant dulness, now 
admitted many interpretations. It hedged round 
a secret unknown to either father or mother. Un- 
known to Katherine? Her grave air of aloofness 
might imply as much, or might mean only a natural 
disapproval of the scolding process carried on be- 
fore her lover, a loyalty to Hilda that would ask no 
question and make no reproach. 

“ Any one would tell you, Hilda, that it is posi- 
144 


HILDA 


lively not decent in Paris for a young girl to be out 
alone after dusk,” said the Captain. “ Odd will tell 
you so ; he was speaking about it only this evening. 
You must come home earlier; I insist upon it.” 

Odd sat opposite to her, and Hilda raised her 
eyes and met his. 

He smiled gravely at her, and shook his head. 

Naughty little Hilda! ” but his voice expressed 
all the tender sympathy the very sight of her roused 
in him, and Hilda smiled back faintly. 

10 145 


CHAPTER III 



ETER brought Katherine the engagement ring 


JT a few days afterward. The drifting had 
ceased abruptly, and he felt the new sense of reality 
as most salutary. His personality and hers now 
filled the horizon ; their relations demanded a 
healthy condensation of thoughts before expanded 
in wandering infinity, and he was thankful for the 
consciousness of definite duty and responsibility 
that made past years seem the refinement of ego- 


tism 


Katherine looked almost roguishly gay that after- 
noon, and, even after the ring was exclaimed over, 
put on, and Peter duly kissed for it, he felt that 
there was still an expression of happy knowingness 
not yet accounted for. 

“ The ring was n’t a surprise, but you have one 
for me, Katherine.” 

Katherine laughed out at his acuteness. 

The ring is lovely ; clever, sensitive Peter ! ” 

“You have quite convinced me of your pleasure 
and my own good taste. What is the news?” 

“Well, Peter, a delightful thing has happened, or 
\s going to happen, rather. Allan Hope is coming 
to Paris next week ! Peter, we may have a double 
wedding ! ” 

“ Hilda has accepted him ? ” 


146 


HILDA 


Oh, we have not openly discussed it, you know. 
Mamma got his letter this morning ; very short. 
He hoped to see us all by Wednesday. Of course, 
mamma is charmed. Hilda said nothing, and went 
off to the studio as usual ; but Hilda never does say 
anything if she is really feeling.” 

Does n’t she ? ” There was a musing quality in 
Odd’s voice. 

I think the child is in love with him ; I thought 
so from the first. Wednesday ! A week from to- 
morrow ! Oh, of course she will have him ! ” Kath- 
erine said jubilantly. 

** Allan is n’t the man to fail in anything. He has 
a great deal of determination.” 

“Yes, he seems the very embodiment of success, 
does n’t he ? That is because he does n’t try to see 
everything at once, like some people I know.” And 
Katherine nodded her head laughingly at 
“ Intellectual epicureanism is fatal. Allan Hope has 
no unmanageable opinions. His party can always 
count on him. He is always there, unchanged — 
unless they change ! He pins his faith to his party, 
and verily he shall have his reward ! By mere force 
of honest mediocrity he will mount to the highest 
places! ” 

“ Venomous little Katherine ! What are you 
trying to insinuate ? ” 

“ Why, that Lord Allan is n’t particularly clever, 
nor particularly anything, except particularly useful 
to men who can be clever for him. He is the bricks 
they build with.” 

“Allan is as honest as the day,” said Peter, a little 
shortly. 


147 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“Honest? Who’s a denygin’ of it, pray? His 
honesty is part of his supreme utility. My simile 
holds good ; he is a brick ; a dishonest man is a 
mere tool, fit only to be cast away, once used.” 

“ How rhetorical we are ! ” said Odd, smiling at 
her with a touch of friendly mockery. 

“Lord Allan most devoutly believes that in his 
party lies the salvation of his country,” Katherine 
pursued. “ Oh, I have talked to him ! ” 

“You have, have you? Poor chap! ” ejaculated 
Peter. “ Will you ever serve me up in this neatly 
dissected way, as a result of our confidential con- 
versations ? ” 

“ Willingly 1 but only to yourself. Don’t be 
afraid, Peter. I could dissect myself far more 
neatly, far more unpleasantly. I have a genius for 
the scalpel 1 And I have said nothing in the least 
derogatory to Allan Hope. He couldn’t disagree 
with his party, any more than a pious Catholic 
could disagree with his church. It is a matter of 
faith, and of shutting the eyes.” 

If Hilda was so soon to pass to the supreme author- 
ity of an accepted lover, Peter felt that for his own 
satisfaction he must make the most of the time left 
him, and solve the riddle of her occupations. That 
delicate sense of loyal reticence had held him from 
a hinted question to even Katherine. If Katherine 
were as ignorant as he, a question would arouse and 
imply suspicion. Odd could suspect Hilda of 
nothing worse than a silly disobedience founded on 
a foolish idea of her own artistic worth ; a dull self- 
absorption, unsaved by a touch of humor. Yet this 
very suspicion irritated Odd profoundly ; it seemed 
148 


HILDA 


logical and yet impossible. He felt, in his very re- 
vulsion from it, a justification for a storming of her 
barriers. 

That very evening, while Katherine played Schu- 
mann, the Captain having gone out and Mrs. Archi- 
nard dozing on the sofa, he determined to have the 
truth if possible. 

Hilda stood behind her sister, listening. Her tall 
slenderness looked well in anything that fell in long 
lines, even if made by the most petite of petite 
couturi^res^ as the gray silk had been. The white 
fichu covered deficiencies of fit, and left free the 
exquisite line of her throat. Her head, in its atti- 
tude of quiet listening, struck Odd with the old 
sense of a beauty significant, not the lovely mask of 
emptiness. 

“ Come and sit by me, Hilda,” he said from his 
place on the sofa, “ you can hear better at this dis- 
tance.” 

The quick turn of her head, her pretty look of 
willingness were charming, he thought. 

“ I like to see you in that dress,” he said, as she 
sat down beside him on the sofa, ** there isn’t a 
whiff of paint or palette about it, except that, in it, 
you look like a picture, and a prettier one than even 
you could paint.” 

“That is a very subtle insult!” Hilda’s smile 
showed a most encouraging continuation of the 
pretty willingness. 

“You see,” said Odd, “you are not fair to your 
friends. You should paint fewer pictures, and be 
more constantly a picture in yourself.” She showed 
a little uneasy doubtfulness of look. 

149 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“ I am afraid I don’t understand you. I am afraid 
I am stupid.” 

You should be a little more, and act a little less.” 

“ But to act is to be,” said Hilda, with a sudden 
laugh. “ We are not listening to Schumann,” she 
added, a trifle maliciously. Her face turned toward 
him in a soft shadow, a line of light just defining 
the cheek’s young oval, the lovely slimness of the 
throat affected Odd with a really rapturously artistic 
appreciation. The shape of her small head, too, 
with its high curves of hair, was elegant with an 
intimate elegance peculiarly characteristic. An 
inner gentle dignity, a voluntary submission to 
exterior facts of existence resulting in a higher 
freedom, a more perfect self-possession, seemed to 
emanate from her ; the very poise of her head sug- 
gested it, and so strong and so sudden was the 
suggestion that Odd felt his curiosity intolerable, 
and those groping suspicions outrageously at sea. 

“ Hilda,” he said abruptly, “ I went to your studio 
the other afternoon. You were not there.” 

Her finger flashed warningly to her lip, and her 
glance towards her mother turned again to him, 
pained and beseeching. 

“ She — they can’t hear,” said Odd, in a still lower 
voice. 

“ No, I was not there,” Hilda repeated. 

“ And your father, your mother, Katherine, think 
you are there when you are not. Is that wise ? 
Don’t be angry with me, my dear Hilda. You may 
have confidence in me. Tell me, do you work some- 
where else ? ” 

“ Ai?. I am not angry. You startled me.” Her 
150 


HILDA 


look was indeed shaken, but sweet, touched even. 
“Yes, I work somewhere else.” 

“ And you keep it a secret ? ” 

She nodded. 

“ Is it safe to keep secrets from your father and 
mother? Or is it a secret kept for their sakes, 
Hilda?” Peter had made mental combinations, 
yet he suspected that in this one he was shooting 
rather far from the mark. No matter. Hilda 
looked away, and seemed revolving some inner 
doubt. Her hesitation surprised him ; he was more 
surprised when, half unwillingly, she whispered, 
“Yes,” still not looking at him. 

“ For their sakes,” repeated Odd, his curiosity 
redoubled. “ Come, Hilda, please tell me all about 
it. For their sakes ? ” 

“ In one way.” Hilda spoke with the same air 
of half-unwilling confidence. But that she should 
confide, that she should not lock herself in stubborn 
silence, was much. 

“ And as you need not keep it for my sake, you 
may tell me,” he urged ; “ I may be able to help 
you.” 

“ Oh ! I don’t need help.” She turned a slightly 
challenging look upon him. “ It is no hardship to 
me, no trouble to keep my little secret.” 

“ You are really unkind now, Hilda.” 

No,”— her smile dwelt on him meditatively ; 
“ but I see no reason, no necessity for telling you. 
I have nothing naughty to confess ! ” and there was 
a touch of pride in her laugh. 

“Yes, you are unkind, for you turn my real anx- 
iety to a jest.” 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


** You must not be anxious.” Her eyes still rested 
on his, sweetly and gently. 

“ Not when I see you surrounded by an atmos- 
phere of carping criticism ? When I see you com- 
ing home, night after night, worn out, too fatigued 
to speak ? When I see that you are thin and white 
and sad? ” 

Hilda drew herself up a little. 

“ Oh, you are mistaken. But — how kind of you ! ” 
and again the irradiated look lit up her face. 

Does that surprise you ? Hilda, Katherine is in 
the dark about this too ? ” 

“ Katherine knows ; but please don’t ask her 
about it.” 

“ She does n’t approve, then ? ” 

“ Not exactly. Besides, it might hurt her. Please 
don’t ask me either. It really is n’t worth any 
mystery, and yet I must keep it a secret.” 

Odd was silent for a moment, a baffling sense of 
pitfalls and hiding-places upon him. 

** But Katherine ought to tell me,” he said at last, 
smiling. 

“ Now you are pushing an unfair advantage. She 
thinks, probably, that it might hurt me. Really, 
really^" she added urgently, “ it is n’t so serious as 
all this seems to make it. The one serious thing is 
that it would hurt mamma, and that is why I make 
such a mountain out of my mole-hill. How mystery 
does magnify the tiniest things ! ” 

“ Tell me, at least, where you go in the afternoon. 
I mean to what part of Paris, to what street.” 

“ I go to several streets,” said Hilda, smiling re- 
signedly, “ since you will be so curious.” 

152 


HILDA 


Where are you going to-morrow ? Give me just 
an idea of your prowess.” 

“ I go to-morrow to the Rue d’Assas.” 

‘‘ Near the Luxembourg Gardens?” 

“ Yes.” 

“ I fancied you were walking yourself to death. 
And next day ? ” 

“ Next day — the Rue Poulletier.” 

And where may that be ? I fancied I knew my 
Paris well.” 

It is a little street in the He St. Louis. That is 
my favorite walk ; home along the quays. I get the 
view of Notre Dame from the back, with all the fly- 
ing buttresses, and the sunset beyond.” 

“No wonder you are tired every night. You 
always walk? ” 

“Usually. I have Palamon with me, and they 
would not take him in a ’bus. But from the lie St. 
Louis I often take the boat, and that is one of the 
treats of Paris, I think, especially when the lights 
are lit. And on some days I go to the Boulevard St. 
Germain. There ; now you shall ask me no more 
questions.” 

Odd made no further comment on the informa- 
tion he had received, but he resolved to be in the 
Rue d’Assas to-morrow. He did not intend to spy, 
but he did intend to walk home with Hilda, and 
to make her understand that one of the brotherly 
offices he claimed was the right to protecting com- 
panionship. He revolved the rdle and its possi- 
bilities, as he lay back in the sofa watching Hilda’s 
profile, and listening to Schumann — a rdle that could, 
at all events, not last long, since Allan Hope arrived 

153 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


on Wednesday. Allan’s arrival would put an end 
to mysteries, to a need for brotherly protection. 
Odd felt a certain curiosity on this point ; indeed 
his attitude towards Hilda was one of continual 
curiosity. 

‘‘ So Allan Hope turns up Wednesday week,” he 
said. I shall be glad to see Allan again.” 

Hilda’s silence might imply displeasure, but Odd, 
in an attitude of manly laziness, one leg crossed 
over the other, one hand holding an ankle, thought 
a little gentle teasing quite allowable. 

“ Will you go bicycling with him, unkind Hilda?” 
He was not prepared for the startled look she turned 
on him. 

When I would not go with you?'' Her own 
vehemence seemed to embarrass her. “ I hardly 
know how to bicycle at all,” she added lamely ; I 
would have gone with you if I had had time.” She 
looked away again, and then, taking a book from 
the table beside her — 

Have you seen the last volume of decadent 
poetry? Isn’t the binding nice?” Odd felt him- 
self justly, but rather severely, reproved ; yet the 
gentle candor of her eyes was kind and soothing. 
Katherine was playing the “ Chopin ” from Schu- 
mann’s “ Carnaval,” and Peter, still holding his 
ankle and feeling rather like a naughty little boy 
forgiven, did not look at the fantastic volume she 
held, but at Hilda herself. How blue the shadows 
were on the milky whiteness of her skin. Odd’s 
eyes followed the thick, soft eddies of hair about 
her forehead. 

'‘Aren’t the margins generous?” said Hilda, 

154 


HILDA 


turning the pages; “ a mere trickle of print through 
the whiteness. Some of the verses are really very 
pretty/’ and she talked gayly, in her gentle way, as 
they went through the pages together. 

155 


CHAPTER IV 


I T was just past four when Peter walked up the 
Rue Bonaparte and stationed himself at the cor- 
ner of the Rue Vavin and the Rued’Assas, opposite 
the Luxembourg Gardens. 

From this point of vantage he could look up and 
down the street, and there would be no chance of 
missing her. She rarely reached home till past six, 
and, even allowing for very slow walking, he was if 
anything too early. 

He felt, as he opened his umbrella — it had begun 
to rain — that his present position might look foolish, 
but was certainly justifiable. He would ask Hilda 
no questions, force in no way her confidence, but 
really on the gray dreariness of such a day she ought 
not to reject but rather to be glad for his proffered 
and unexpected companionship. The combined 
dreariness of the afternoon with its cold rain, the 
gray street, the desolate-looking branches of the 
trees in the Luxembourg Gardens, inspired him with 
a painful sympathy for Hilda’s pursuits. She was, 
probably, working in one of these tall, severe houses ; 
perhaps with some atelier chum fallen beneath the 
ban of Mrs. Archinard’s disapproval, and clung to 
with a girl’s enthusiasm. Disobedient of Hilda, 
very. The chum might be masculine. This was a 
new and disagreeable supposition ; a Marie Bash- 
156 


HILDA 


kirtseff, Bastien Lepage affair ; Bohemia gloried in 
such audacities ; it was difficult to associate Hilda 
with such feats of independence. There was a mys- 
tery somewhere, however, and if not mountainous, 
it must be more than mere mole-hill. It was very 
windy, and the rain blew slantingly. Katherine 
would find the situation amusing. A vision of the 
sympathetic amusement was followed by the realiza- 
tion that to betray his Quixotism might be to be- 
tray Hilda’s confidence. Yet Hilda had made no 
confidence. Peter rebelled at the mere suggestion 
of concealment. Knowing all, Katherine could 
surely know that he had been admitted into the 
outer courts of the mystery. He had ample time 
for every variety of reflection, for he had been stand- 
ing in the rain for over an hour, when Hilda ap- 
peared not far from him, stepping from the door of 
one of the largest and most dignified of the gray 
houses. She paused on the wet pavement to open 
her umbrella, and Peter had a glimpse of the wide 
red lips and small black beard of an unpleasant-look- 
ing French youth, who seemed to loiter behind her 
with a certain air of expectancy. It was impossible 
to connect his commonplace vulgarity of aspect 
with Bohemian friendships or with Hilda, and, in- 
deed, she gave him a mere nod, not looking at him 
at all, and came walking up the street, her skirt 
raised in one hand, showing slim feet and ankles. 
Odd, as he contemplated her advance, was reminded 
of the light poise of a Jean Goujon nymph. Her 
umbrella, lowered against the wind, hid him from her. 

“ Well, Hilda,” he said amicably, when she was 
almost beside him — the umbrella tilted back over 

157 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


her shoulder, and the rain fell on her startled face — 
“ Here I am.” 

Her stare of utmost amazement was very amusing, 
but she looked white and tired. 

“ I must get a fiacre, I have n’t your taste for 
plodding through rain and mud, and you ’ll be kind 
enough to forego the enjoyment for one day, won’t 
you ? ” Her stupefaction at last resolved itself into 
one word : “ Well ! ” she exclaimed with emphasis, 
and then she laughed outright. 

“By Jove, child, you look done up. I’m glad 
you ’re not angry, though. You would n’t laugh if 
you were angry, would you? Here is a fiacre'' 
He hailed the approaching vehicle ; the cocker's 
hat and cape, the roof of the cab, the horse’s water- 
proof covering glistened with rain in the dying light. 

“You are very, very kind,” Hilda said, rather 
gravely now, as they stood side by side on the curb 
while the fiacre rattled up to them. 

“ I always intend to be kind, Hilda, if you will let 
me. Jump in.” He followed her, slamming the 
door with relief, and depositing the two dripping 
umbrellas in a corner. 

“ You must be drenched,” said Hilda solemnly. 

“ Imitation is the sincerest flattery, I believe ; 
your fondness for drenchings inspired me. You are 
not one bit angry, then ? You see I ask you no 
questions.” 

“ Angry ? It was too good of you ! ” Her voice 
was still meditative. 

“ I am much relieved that you should say so. I 
was only conscious of guilt.” 

“ How long did you wait ? ” 

158 


HILDA 


‘‘ About an hour.” 

And it was pouring ! ” 

“ Oh no, not pouring. I have suffered far worse 
drenchings for far less pleasure. One has no um- 
brella in Scotland on the moors.” 

‘‘One has, at least, the scenery.” Hilda smiled. 

“Yes; the Rue d’Assas is n’t particularly inspir- 
ing. I don’t disclaim honor ; that corner was most 
wearing. Only the irritation of waiting for my 
mysterious little truant kept me from finding it 
dreary.” 

“ Don’t call me mysterious, please.” 

“ But you are mysterious, Hilda ; very. How- 
ever, I promised myself, and I promise you, to say 
no more about it, to ask no questions.” 

“You are so kind, so good.” There was deep 
feeling in her voice ; she looked at him with a cer- 
tain wistful eagerness. “You really do care, don’t 
you? Shall I tell you ? I should like to. It seems 
silly not to tell you, and I think you have a right to 
know — after to-day.” 

“ I really care a great deal, Hilda ; but — I don’t 
want to take an unfair advantage, you know ; I 
really have no right whatsoever. Wait till this im- 
pulse of unmerited gratitude has passed.” 

“ But it is nothing to tell, really nothing. You 
see — I make money. I have to — I teach. There ; 
that is all.” 

Peter looked at her, at the white oval of her face, 
at the unfashionable little hat, at the shabby coat 
and skirt. A lily of the field who toiled and spun. 
And a hot resentment rose within him as he thought 
of the father, the mother, the sister. 

159 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


Why have you to ? he asked, in a hard voice. 

We are so dreadfully poor, and we are so dread- 
fully in debt.” 

“ But why you alone ? What can you do ? ” 

“ I can do a good deal. I have been very lucky. 
I love my work too, and I make money by it, so 
it is natural. Mamma, of course, would think it 
terrible, degrading even ; but I can’t agree with 
mamma’s point of view ; I think it is quite wrong. 
I see nothing terrible or degrading.” 

No; nothing terrible or degrading, I grant you.” 

“You think I am right, don’t you?” 

“Yes; quite right, dear, quite right.” 

Odd paused before adding : “ It is the incongruity 
that is shocking.” 

“ The incongruity ? ” Hilda’s voice was vague. 

“ Between your life and theirs ; yes.” 

“ Oh, you don’t understand. I love my work ; 
it is my pleasure. Besides, they don’t know ; they 
don’t realize the necessity either.” 

“Why the teaching? I thought your pictures 
sold well.” 

“ And so they do, often ; but I took up the 
teaching some years ago, before I had any hope 
of selling my pictures; it is very sure^ very well 
paid, and I really find it a rest after five hours of 
studio work ; after five hours I don’t feel a picture 
any longer.” 

“ Yet they must know that the money comes from 
somewhere? ” 

Hilda’s voice in replying held a pained quality ; 
this attack on her family very evidently perplexed 
her. 

i6o 


HILDA 


Mamma thinks it comes from papa, and papa, 
I suppose, does n’t think about it at all ; he knows, 
too, that I sell my pictures. You must n’t imagine,” 
she added, with a touch of pride and resentment, 
“ that they would let me teach if they knew ; you 
must n’t imagine that for one moment. And I don’t 
mean to let them know, for then I could n’t help 
them ; as it is, my help is limited. The money 
goes, for the most part, towards guarding mamma. 
She could not bear shocks and anxiety.” 

Odd said nothing for some moments. 

How did it begin? how did you come to think 
of it ? ” he asked. 

“ It began some years ago, at the studio where 
I worked when I first came to Paris. There was 
a kind, dull French girl there; she had no talent, 
and she was very rich. She heard my work praised 
a good deal, and one day, after I had got a picture 
.into the Salon for the first time, she came and asked 
me if I would give her lessons. Fifteen francs an 
hour.” Hilda paused in a way which showed Odd 
that the recollection was painful to her. 

It seemed a very strange thing to me at first, 
that she should ask me. I had, I ’m afraid, rather 
silly ideas about Katherine and myself ; as though 
we were very elevated young persons, above all the 
unpleasant realities of life. But my common sense 
soon got the better of my pride ; or rather, I should 
say, the false pride made way for the honest. We 
were awfully poor just then. Papa, of course, never 
could, never even tried to make money ; but that win- 
ter he went in for exasperated speculation, and really 
Katherine and I did not know what was to become 
i6i 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 

of us. To keep it from mamma was the great 
thing. Katherine was just beginning to go out, and 
no money for gowns and cabs; no money, even, for 
mamma’s books. Keeping up with current literature 
is expensive, you know, and mamma has a horror of 
circulating libraries. The thought of poor mamma’s 
empty life soon decided me. I remember she had 
asked one day for John Addington Symonds’s last 
book, and Katherine and I looked at one another, 
knowing that it could not be bought. I realized 
then, that at all events I could make enough to 
keep mamma in books and Katherine in gloves. 
You can’t think how nasty, how egotistic my vulgar 
hesitation seemed to me. My life so full, so happy, 
and theirs on the verge of ruin. There is something 
very selfish about art, you know; it shuts one off 
so much from real life, makes one so indifferent to 
scrapings and pinchings. I realized that, with my 
shabby clothes and apparent talent, it was most 
natural for the French girl to think I should be glad 
of her offer; and indeed I was. It was soothing, 
too, to have her so eager. She wanted me very 
much, so I yielded gracefully.” Hilda gave a little 
smile of self-mockery. “ I have taught her ever 
since. She lives in that house in the Rue d’Assas ; 
rich, bourgeois people, common, but kind. She has 
no talent ” — Hilda’s matter-of-fact manner of knowl- 
edge was really impressive — “ but I don’t feel un- 
fair in going on with her, for she really does see 
things now, and that is the greatest pleasure next to 
seeing and accomplishing ; and, indeed, how rarely 
one accomplishes. Through her I have a great 
many pupils, for other girls at the studio heard of 
j63 


HILDA 


her progress with me, and wanted private lessons 
too. All my afternoons are taken up, and, with 
fifteen francs an hour, you can see what a lot I make. 
It rather annoys me to think of people far cleverer 
than I am who can make nothing, and I, just be- 
cause I have had luck, making so much. But among 
my pupils, I really have quite a vogue ; and I am a 
good teacher, I really think I am.” 

I am sure your pupils are very lucky. You have 
a great many, you say ? ” 

“Yes, quite a lot. Sometimes I give three les- 
sons in an afternoon. With Mademoiselle Lebon, 
my first pupil, I spend all the afternoon twice a 
week. She has a gorgeous studio.” Hilda smiled 
again. “ It is very nice working there. To-morrow 
I go for two hours to an old lady ; she lives in the 
Boulevard St. Germain ; she is a dear, and a great 
deal of talent too ; she does flowers exquisitely ; not 
the dreadful feminine vulgarities one usually asso- 
ciates with women’s flower-painting; why all the 
incompetents should fall back on those loveliest and 
most difficult things, I never could understand. But 
my pupil really sees and selects. Only think how 
funny ! Katherine met her son at a dance one 
night — the Comte de Chalons — insignificant but 
nice, she said ; how little he could have connected 
Katherine with his mother s teacher ! Indeed, he 
never saw me,” and Hilda’s smile became decidedly 
clever. “ I suppose the comtesse — she really is a 
dear, too — thinks that for a penniless young teacher 
I am too pretty. Well, I make on an average thirty 
francs an afternoon. I give Mademoiselle Lebon 
and Madame de Chalons double time for their 
163 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


money, as old pupils. It would be easier to have a 
class in my studio, of course, but I would lose many 
of my most interesting pupils, who don’t care about 
going out ; then, too, it would be almost impossible 
to keep my misdoings undiscovered. And there is 
all the mystery ! ” She leaned forward in the dusk 
of the cab to smile at him playfully. “ I am glad to 
get it off my mind ; glad, too, that you should know 
why I am so often cross and dull ; by the time I 
reach home I am tired. I always bring Palamon, 
unless it is as rainy as to-day, and of course he puts 
omnibuses out of the question ; omnibuses mount 
up, too, when one takes them every day. Excuse 
these sordid details.” 

“ I should think that a young lady who earns 
thirty francs an afternoon might afford a cab.” 
Odd found it rather difficult to speak. She was 
mercifully unaware of the aspect in which her 
drudging, crushed young life appeared to him. 

“And then, what would Palamon and I do for 
exercise ! ” said Hilda lightly ; “ it is the walking 
that keeps me well, I am sure.” 

His silence seemed to depress her gayety, for after 
a moment she added: “ And really you don’t know 
how poor we are. I have no right to cabs, really. 
As it is, it often seems wrong to me spending the 
money as I do when we owe so much, so terribly 
much. Thirty francs is a lot, but we need every 
penny of it, for mere everyday life. I have paid 
off some of the smaller debts by instalments, 
but the weekly bills seem to swallow up every- 
thing.” 

His realization of this silent struggle — the whole 
164 


HILDA 


weight of her selfish family on her frail shoulders — 
made Odd afraid of his own indignation. The re- 
membrance of Mrs. Archinard’s whines, the Captain’s 
taunts, yes, and worst of all, Katherine’s gowns and 
gayety, almost overcame him. He took her hand 
in his and held it as they rolled along through the 
wetly shining streets. His continued silence rather 
alarmed Hilda. The relief of full confidence was so 
great that she could not bear it impaired by any 
misinterpretation. 

“You do understand,” she said ; “you do think I 
am right? My success seems unmerited to you, 
perhaps ? But I try to give my best. I seem very 
selfish and unkind to mamma, I know, but I really 
am kind — don’t you think so ? — in keeping the truth 
from her and letting her misjudge me. I know you 
have thought of me that I was one of those selfish 
idiots who neglect their real duties for their art ; 
but I can do more for mamma outside our home. 
And I read to her in the evening. Oh, how con- 
ceited, egotistic, all that sounds ! But I do want 
you to believe that I try to do what seems best and 
wisest.” 

“ Hilda ! Hilda ! ” he put her hand to his lips and 
kissed the worn glove. 

“You simply astound me,” he said, after a mo- 
ment ; “ your little life facing this great Paris.” 

“ Oh, I am very careful, very wise,” Hilda said 
quickly. 

“Careful? You mean that if you were not you 
might encounter unpleasantnesses ? ” 

She looked at him with a look of knowledge that 
went strangely with her delicate face. 

165 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


Of course one must be careful. I am young — 
and pretty. I have learned that.” 

“ My child, what other things have you learned ? ” 
And Odd’s hold tightened on her hand. 

“ That terrifying things might happen if one were 
not brave. Don’t exaggerate, please. I really have 
found so few lions in my path, and a girl of dignity 
cannot be really annoyed beyond a certain point. 
Lions are very much magnified in popular and con- 
ventional estimation. A girl can, practically, do 
anything she likes here in Paris if she is quiet and 
self-reliant.” 

Odd stared at her. 

“ Of course I have always been a coward, after a 
fashion ; I was frightened at first,” said Hilda. He 
understood now the look of moral courage that had 
haunted him ; natural timidity steeled to endurance. 

The greatest trouble with me is that I am too 
noticeable, too pretty.” She spoke of her beauty 
in a tone of matter-of-fact experience ; “ it is a pity 
for a working woman.” 

“ My child,” Odd repeated. He felt dazed. 

Please don’t exaggerate,” Hilda reiterated. 

“ Exaggerate? Tell me about these lions. How 
have you vanquished them? ” 

** I have merely walked past them.” 

His evident dismay gave her a merry little moment 
of superior wisdom. 

They frightened me and that was all. One was 
the husband of a person I taught. He used to lie 
in wait for me in the dining-room.” Hilda gave 
Odd a rather meditative glance. ‘‘You won’t be 


HILDA 

angry ? Angry with me for keeping on in my path 
of independence ? ” 

“ No ; I won't be angry with you.” Odd felt that 
his very lips were white. 

“Well, he gave me a letter one day.” Hilda 
paused. “ What a despicable man ! ” she said re- 
flectively ; “ I taught his wife ! I tore the letter in 
two, gave it back to him, and walked out. Natu- 
rally, I never went back again.” Her voice suddenly 
broke. “ Oh ! it was horrible ! I felt — ” 

“ What did you feel?” 

“ I felt as though I were for evermore set apart 
from my kind of girl, from girls like Katherine. I 
felt smirched, as though some one had thrown 
mud at me. That was morbid. I got over it.” 

“ Heavens ! ” Odd ejaculated. “ Katherine knows 
this too ? ” he asked bitingly. 

“ Oh no, no ! Mr. Odd, you are the only person. 
Never speak of it, will you ? Never, never! Poor 
Kathy I It would drive her mad 1 ” 

“And she knows of your work?” 

“Yes ; I had to tell her of that. She felt dread- 
fully about it. She wanted me to go out with her, 
and have pretty dresses, and meet the clever people 
she meets. You should have seen how happy she 
was in London last spring I To have me with her ! 
Wrenched away from my paint ! Of course I could 
not give up my work, even if there had been money 
enough. I made her see that, and I can't say I 
made her agree, but I made her yield. She takes 
a false view of it still, and worries over it. She 
wants me to give up the teaching and paint pic- 
tures only ; but that would be too risky, they don’t 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


sell so surely. I have several on my hands. But 
Katherine knows nothing of lions and unpleasant- 
ness. I must keep such things secret, or I should 
not be allowed to go on.” 

“You think I am safe. I must allow you, I 
suppose? ” 

“Yes, you must.” She smiled a very decided 
little smile, adding gravely, “ I have confided in 
you.” 

“Trust me.” There was silence in the cab for 
some moments. The tall trees of the Cours la 
Reine dripped in a misty mass on one side ; on the 
other was the Seine with its lights. 

“ And the young man I saw at the door as you 
came out to-day ? ” said Odd. 

“ Oh, that is nothing, I hope. He is Mademoi- 
selle Lebon’s brother. A harmlessly disagreeable 
creature, I fancy.” Odd resumed his brooding 
silence. “ What are you thinking of so solemnly ? ” 
she asked. 

“ Of you.” 

“ Why so solemnly ? I am afraid you are labor- 
ing under all sorts of false impressions. I have told 
my story stupidly.” 

“ The true impression has stupefied me. Good 
heavens ! Theoretically I believe in the develop- 
ment of character at all costs, and you have certainly 
developed a rara avis in the line ; but practically, 
practically, my dear little girl, I would have you 
taken care of in cotton- wool, guarded, protected ; 
you would always be lovely, and you would have 
been happy. You have been very unhappy.” 

Hilda was looking at him with that rather vague 
1 68 


HILDA 

look of impersonal contemplation characteristic of 
her. 

‘‘ How you exaggerate things,” she said, smiling; 
“ I have not been unhappy.” 

“ The pity of it ! The pathos ! ” Odd pursued, 
not heeding her comment. Hilda looked at him 
rather sadly. 

“You mean that I should have lost my igno- 
rance? Yes, that made me feel badly,” she as- 
sented. “ That is the worst of it. One becomes 
so suspicious. But, Mr. Odd, that is merely a 
sentimental regret. I have not lost my self-respect. 
I am not ignorant of things I should like to ignore ; 
but one may know a great many things, and be 
unharmed.” 

“ My dear child, you are probably innocent of 
things familiar to many modern girls. No knowl- 
edge could harm you. You have a right to more 
than self-respect. You are a little heroine. Your 
unrewarded, unrecognized fight fills me with amaze- 
ment and reverence. I did not know that such 
self-forgetful devotion existed.” 

“ Oh, please don’t talk like that ! It is quite 
ridiculous ! We must have money, and I can make 
it easily. I would be quite a monster if I sat idly 
at home, and saw mamma in squalid misery. I 
merely do my duty.” Hilda spoke quite sharply 
and decisively. 

“ Merely ! ” Odd ejaculated. 

A thought of the near future, of Allan Hope, 
kept him silent, otherwise he might have indulged 
in reckless invective. He still held her hand, and 
again he raised it to his lips. 

169 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“ That is a very stubborn and unconvinced salute, 
I am afraid,” Hilda said good-humoredly. 

“ May I come and get you now and then ? ” he 
asked. 

“You think it would be wise? ” 

“ How do you mean wise, Hilda?” 

“ I might be found out. I have given you my 
secret. You must help me to keep it.” 

“I may speak of it to Katherine — since she 
knows ? ” 

“ Oh, of course, to Katherine. But don’t egg 
her on to worry me ! ” laughed Hilda ; “ and speak 
to her with reservations — there are things she must 
not know.” 

Peter wondered if the child-friendship, the 
brotherly relations, entitled him to seal the com- 
pact with a kiss upon her lips. He looked at her 
with a sudden quickening of breath. Her dimly 
seen face was very beautiful. This realization of her 
beauty’s attraction at that moment struck him with 
a sense of abasement before her. Surely no such 
poor tie held him to this lovely soul. And, at the 
turn of his own thoughts, Odd felt a vague stir 
of fear. 


CHAPTER V 


O DD was to take a walk in the Bois with Kath- 
erine the next morning, and he found her 
waiting for him in hat and coat and furs, a delight- 
fully smart and wintry little figure. Katherine never 
failed in elegance, in well-groomed finish — her low- 
heeled little boots, her irreproachable snowy gloves, 
bore the same unmistakable stamp of the that 

costs, that is not to be procured readymade. Odd, 
as a rich man, had given very little thought to the 
power of money, and little thought to Katherine’s 
garments except as charmingly characteristic sym- 
bols of good taste ; but to-day his eye noted the 
black fur that fell about her shoulders and trailed 
lustrous ends to her very feet, more for its richness 
than its becomingness. 

Her bright though slightly grave smile failed to 
restore him to his usual attitude of bon camaraderie. 
He smiled and kissed her, but he was conscious of 
underlying soreness, conscious, too, that he might 
lose his temper with Katherine ; he had never lost 
it with Alicia. Katherine’s very superiority made it 
imperative to have things out with her. Kindly 
resignation was an impossibility. He realized that 
not to admire Katherine would make life with her 
intolerable. She would immediately perceive res- 
ervations and she would revolt against them. He 
171 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


wondered whether he should be the one to broach 
the subject of Hilda’s ill-treatment, and was amazed 
at a certain embarrassed shrinking, as from a feeling 
too deep for words, that kept him silent as they 
walked along, taking a short cut to the Place de 
I’Etoile, where the Arc stood in almost cardboard 
clearness on the pale cold sky. It was Katherine 
who spoke — 

Hilda told me of your kindness yesterday. It 
touched her very much.” 

In some subtle way it irritated Odd to hear 
Katherine vouch for Hilda’s feeling. 

“And Hilda told you that I had been admitted 
into the mystery of the Archinard family ? ” His 
voice was even enough, but it held a certain keen- 
ness that Katherine was quick to recognize. 

“You don’t think their mystery creditable, do 
you? Nor do I, Peter. But mamma knows nothing 
of it, nor papa ; and I have tried to dissuade Hilda 
from the first.” 

“ My dear Katherine, the child has worked like 
a galley-slave for you all! Your necessities were 
more potent facts than your dissuasions, I fancy ! ” 

Katherine gave a look at the fine severity of the 
profile beside her. She felt herself arraigned, and 
her impulse was towards rebellion. However, her 
voice was gentle, submissive even, as she answered 
him — 

“ I know it must look badly to you — cruel even. 
But, Peter, don’t you know — you do know — how 
things ^row around one? One can hardly tell 
where the definite wrongdoing comes in, or rather 
the definite submission to a wrong situation.” This 
172 


HILDA 


was so true, that Katherine felt immediately the 
mollified quality of his voice as he answered — 

“ I know. I know submission was forced upon 
you, no doubt. But I had rather you had not sub- 
mitted when once the situation grew definite. And 
I wish, Katherine, that you had helped her in mak- 
ing the situation easier. Granting that you could 
give her no material aid — granting that her faculty 
is good luck — still the actual burden might have 
been lightened.” 

Odd paused ; he could not say his thoughts out- 
right — tell her that the comparative luxury of her 
life and her mother’s was outrageous, shocking to 
him now that he understood its source. 

“ It is part of Hilda’s good luck that her pleasures 
are not costly, or rather that she can herself defray 
their cost,” said Katherine quietly. She has al- 
ways lived in her art — seemed to care for nothing 
else. My life would indeed have been dreadful had 
I not accepted the interests that came into it. I 
have always felt, too, that in following the natural 
bent of my own character, I was laying foundations 
that might some day repay Hilda for everything. 
If she has friends — a public — it is owing to me. It 
was I who persuaded her to come to London last 
spring. I, therefore, who assured her future, in a 
sense, for there Allan Hope fell in love with her. 
I have felt that I have been doing my duty, in my 
own far less conventionally fine way, but doing it 
nevertheless. I make a circle for mamma ; I brighten 
her life and my own and Hilda’s, as far as she will 
let me. Certain tools are necessary — Hilda needs 
brushes and canvases and studios ; I, a few gowns, 

173 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


a few cabs, and a supply of neat boots and gloves. 
Still the contrast is uncomplimentary to me, I own ; 
but when Hilda proposed this work of hers, I en- 
treated her to give up the idea — I said we would 
all starve together rather. She insisted, and how 
can I interfere ? ” 

I can understand, Katherine, that everything 
you say is most convincing to yourself ; I see the 
perfect honesty of your own point of view. But, 
my dear girl, it is slightly sophistical honesty. Hilda 
denies herself the commonest comforts of life, not 
only to give you the luxuries, but because her high 
sense of honor rebels against spending on herself 
money that is owed to others. Don’t misunderstand 
me ; I don’t ask any such perhaps overstrained 
sense of responsibility from you. You have, no 
doubt, been fully justified in living your own life; 
but could it not have been lived with a little less 
elegance ? I am sure that you would be welcomed 
everywhere, Katherine, with even fewer gowns and 
fewer gloves.” 

Katherine flushed lightly ; her flushes were never 
deep, and always becoming. It certainly cut her 
now to hear his almost unconscious implication — 
that from her he expected a less perfect sense of 
honor than from her sister. She swallowed a certain 
wrathful mortification that welled up, and answered 
with some apparent cheerfulness — 

You don’t know your world, Peter, if you fancy 
that even Katherine Archinard would be welcome 
in darned and dirty gloves ! ” 

Odd walked on silently. 

And might she not be forced into taking some 

174 


HILDA 


girlish distraction ? ’’ he said presently. “ It came 
out yesterday, with that astounding air of excusing 
herself she has, that she reads to her mother in the 
evening ! Could not you do that, Katherine, and 
let Hilda profit now and then by the entourage you 
have created for her ? ” 

Katherine’s flush deepened. 

“ Mamma does n’t care for my reading, and Hilda 
won’t go out ; she goes to bed too early.” 

And then,” Odd continued, ignoring her com- 
ment in a way most irritating to Katherine’s smart- 
ing susceptibility, “ you might have gone with her 
now and again to these houses where she teaches. 
You would have stood for protection. You would 
have seen for yourself if, in this drudgery, there 
lurked any unpleasantness, any danger. A girl of 
her extreme beauty is — exposed to insult.” 

Katherine gave him a stare of frank astonishment. 

“ Oh, you must not give way to unpleasant ro- 
mancing of that sort ! Things like that only happen 
in novels of the silliest sort — even to beauties ! And 
Hilda would have told me. She tells me everything. 
Really, Peter, she must have given you a wrong im- 
pression ; she enjoys her life ! ” 

“ So she tried to convince me,” said Odd, with a 
good deal of sharpness ; “ there was no hint of com- 
plaint, regret, reproach, in Hilda’s recountal ; don’t 
imagine it, Katherine.” 

Katherine was telling herself that never in all her 
life had she experienced so many rebuffs. She con- 
templated her own good temper with some amaze- 
ment ; she also wondered how long it would last. 
By this time they were half-way down the Avenue 

175 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


du Bois ; the day was fine and clear, and the wintry 
trees were sharply definite against the sky. 

“ I have never even seen her in a well-made gown,” 
said Odd. 

“ Hilda scorns the fashion-plate garment, as I do. 
We are both original in that respect.” 

“ Your originality takes different forms.” 

“ Because it must adapt itself to different condi- 
tions, Peter. I won’t be scolded about my dresses. 
Men like you imagine that, because a woman looks 
well, she must spend a lot. It is n’t so with me. My 
dresses last forever, and, to go into details, Hilda 
by no means clothes me. Papa has money — now 
and then. Even Hilda could not support the family, 
and her money mainly goes for mamma’s books and 
oysters and hot-house grapes. If she will not spend 
it on herself, and if, now and then, I accept some of 
it, I cannot consent to feel unduly humiliated.” 

There was a decisiveness in Katherine’s tone that 
warned Peter to self-control. Indeed the situation 
had been created for her. She had owned up frankly 
to her distaste for it, her realization of its wrong. 

“ I am not going to ask undue humiliation of you, 
my dear Katherine. Don’t think me such a prig- 
gish brute ; but I am going to ask you to help me to 
put an end to this.” Katherine’s smiles had returned. 

‘‘ Allan Hope will.” 

Peter walked on, looking gloomy. 

“You won’t realize that Hilda’s life is the one 
that gives her the greatest enjoyment. I have al- 
ways envied Hilda you came; and even now” 
— Katherine’s smile was playful — “ Allan Hope is 
very nice! Take patience, Peter, till Wednesday,” 
176 


HILDA 


“Yes ; we must wait.” 

“ I have waited for so long ! Hilda could not have 
minded what you call the ‘ drudgery.’ She had only 
to lift her finger to end it.” 

“ Hilda would not be the girl to lift her finger.” 

“You appreciate my Hilda, Peter; I am glad.” 
Katherine gave his abstracted countenance another 
of her bright contemplative glances. There was 
nothing sly in Katherine’s glances, and yet underly- 
ing this one was a world of kindly, though very keen 
analysis ; disappointment, rebellion, and level-headed 
tolerance. This was decidedly not the man to be 
fitted to her frame. He could not be moulded to a 
clever woman’s liking, for all his indefiniteness. On 
certain points of the conduct of life, Katherine felt 
that she would meet an opposition sharply definite. 
Katherine understood and was perfectly tolerant of 
criticism, but she did not like it ; nor did she like 
being put in the wrong. That Peter now considered 
her very much in the wrong was evident. She was 
also aware that the sophistry of her explanation had 
deceived herself even less than it had deceived him. 
That Hilda spent her life in drudgery, and that 
she spent hers in pleasure-seeking, were facts most 
palpable to Katherine’s very impartial vision. She 
knew she was wrong, and she knew that only 
frank avowal would meet Peter’s severity and touch 
his tenderness and humor. If she heaped shame on 
her own head, he would be the first to cry out against 
the injustice. 

Yet Katherine hesitated to own herself wrong. 
She was not sure that she cared to place her lover 
in the sheltering and leading attitude of the Love 

12 177 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


in the ** Love and Life.” The meek, trembling look 
of Life had always irritated her in the picture. 
Katherine felt herself quite strong enough to stand 
alone, and felt that she would like to lead in all 
things. It was with a deep inner sense of humilia- 
tion that she said — 

“ Please don’t be cross with me, Peter. Please 
don’t scold me. I have been naughty — far naugh- 
tier than I dreamed of — you have made me realize 
it, though you are not quite just. But you must 
comfort me for my own misdoings.” 

As Katherine went on she felt an artistic impul- 
siveness, almost real, and which sounded so real that 
Peter met the sweet pleading of her eyes with a 
start of self-disgust. 

Peter was very tender-hearted, very sympathetic, 
very prone to self-doubt. Katherine’s look made 
him feel a very prig of pompous righteousness. 

“ Why, Katherine ! ” he said, pausing in his walk. 
‘‘ My dear Katherine ! as if I could not appreciate 
the slow growth of necessity ! I only hope you 
may never have to comfort me for far worse sins ! ” 

This was satisfactory. But Katherine’s pride still 
squirmed. 

Odd went to meet Hilda on Thursday, Saturday, 
Monday, and Tuesday. The distances were always 
great, and he insisted on cabs for the return trip. 
Palamon must be tired, even if Hilda were not. 
He was too old for such journeyings ; and Hilda 
had smilingly to submit. Wednesday would end it 
all definitely ; Peter thought that he saw the end 
with unmixed satisfaction, and yet when Allan 
Hope walked into his rooms early on Wednesday 
178 


HILDA 


morning, this Perseus of Hilda’s womanhood gave 
the Perseus of her childhood a really unpleasant 
turn of the blood. There was something irritating 
in Allan Hope’s absolute fitness for the rdle^ em- 
phasizing, as it did, Peter’s own unfitness, his forty 
years, and his desultory life. 

Active energy, the go-ahead perseverance that 
knows no doubts, the honest and loyal convictions 
which were all arranged for him from his cradle, 
and which he would bequeath to his children un- 
altered, all things that make for order and well- 
being, looked at one from Lord Allan’s clear, light 
eyes. Odd suddenly felt himself to be an uncertain 
cumberer of the earth ; failure personified beside 
the other’s air of inevitable success. He was fond 
of Hope and Hope fond of him, and they talked as 
old friends talk, with the intimacy that time brings ; 
an intimacy far removed from the strong knittings 
of sympathy that an hour may accomplish ; for, 
though Odd understood Allan very well, Allan did 
not muddle his direct views of things by a com- 
prehension that implied condonation. He thought 
it rather a pity that Odd had not made more of his 
life. Odd’s books were n’t much good that he could 
see ; better do something than write about the 
things other men have done. Odd felt that Allan 
was probably quite right. They hardly spoke of 
Hilda, but in Hope’s congratulations on Peter’s en- 
gagement there was a ring of heartfelt brotherly 
warmth that implied much, and left Peter in a 
gloomy rage with himself for feeling miserable. 
Peter had not analyzed the darks and glooms of the 
last few days. 


179 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


Growth does not admit of much self-contempla- 
tion. One wakes suddenly to the accomplished 
change. If Peter was conscious of developments, 
he defined them as morbid enlargements of that 
self-doubt which would naturally thrill under the 
stress of new responsibilities. 

Only from the force of newly formed habit did 
he go to the Rue Poulletier that afternoon, hardly 
expecting to meet Hilda. But Hilda had, as yet, 
not interrupted her usual avocations. She emerged 
from the gloomy portals of one of the old disman- 
tled-looking hotels that line the Rue Poulletier with 
a certain dignity, and she looked toward the cor- 
ner where he stood with a confident glance. It was 
the second time he had met her there, twice in the 
Rue d’Assas too. 

“ It is so kind of you,” she said, as she joined him 
and they turned into the quai ; ‘‘ only you must n’t 
think that you must^ you know.” 

“ May I think that I must ? Give me the assur- 
ance of necessity. I am always a little afraid of 
seeming officious.” 

Hilda smiled round at him. 

Who is fishing? You know I love to have you 
come. You can’t think how I look forward to it.” 
She was walking beside him along the quai. The 
unobtrusive squareness of the “ Doric little Morgue” 
was on their left, as they faced the keen wind and 
the dying sunset. Notre Dame stood gray upon 
a chilly evening sky of palest yellow. I know 
now that I was lonely.” 

That implies the kindest compliment.” 

‘‘ More than implies^ I hope.” 

i8o 


HILDA 


“You really like to have me come?” 

“ You know I do. I am only afraid that you will 
rob yourself — of other things for me.” 

The candor of her eyes was childlike. 

“ My little friend.” Odd felt that he could not 
quite trust himself, and took refuge in the con- 
venient assertion. 

The cold, clear wind blew against their faces ; it 
ruffled the water, and the gray waves showed sharp 
steely lights. The leafless trees made an arabesque 
of tracery on the river and the sky. Hilda looked 
up at the kind, melancholy face beside her, a 
faint touch of cynicism in her sad smile ; but the 
cynicism was all for herself, and it was not exces- 
sive. She accepted this renaissance gratefully, 
though the disillusions of the past were unforget- 
able. 

“ Tell me, Hilda, that you will be my friend what- 
ever happens — to you or to me.” 

“ I have always been your friend, have I not ? ” 

“ Have you, Hilda, always ? ” 

“ I am dully faithful.” Hilda’s smile was a little 
baffling ; it gave no warrant for the sudden quick- 
ening of the breath that he had experienced more 
than once of late. 

“ I feel as if I had found you, Hilda.” 

“ Did you look for me, then ? ” 

The smile was now decidedly baffling and yet 
very sweet. 

“ You know,” she added, “ I liked you from that 
first moment when you fished me out of the river. 
It seems that you are fated to act always the 
chivalrous part toward me.” 

i8i 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


I would ask no better fate. Hilda, you have 
seen Allan Hope ? Not yet ? ” 

No ; not yet.” Hilda’s face grew serious. 
“ He is coming to tea this afternoon.” 

“ But you must be there.” 

“Yes, I suppose I must.” This affectation of 
girlish indifference seemed to Odd more significant 
than noticeable shyness. 

“ We must take a cab,” he said, trying to keep 
his voice level. 

“ Oh, it makes no difference. Cabs, you see, are 
never reckoned with in my arrivals. I am warranted 
to be late.” 

“ But you must not be late.” 

“ But if I want to ? ” There was certainly a touch 
of roguery in her eyes. 

“ If you want to and if I want you to, it shows 
that you are cruel and I conscienceless. Here is a 
cab. Away with you, Hilda. Au revoiry 

“ Are n’t you coming too ? ” asked Hilda, pausing 
in the act of lifting Palamon. 

“ Not to-day ; I can’t.” Odd knew that he was 
cowardly. “ I shall see you to-morrow ? I suppose 
not.” 

“Why, yes, if you come to the Boulevard St. 
Germain.” Hilda had deposited Palamon on the 
floor of the cab and still stood by the open door 
looking rather dismayed. 

“ Really ! ” 

“ I shall go there.” 

“ I too, then. Remember our vow of friendship, 
Hilda. I wish you everything that is good and 
happy.” 


182 


HILDA 


There was seemingly a slightly hurt look on Hil- 
da’s face as she drove away. In spite of the vow, 
Peter feared that this was the last of Hilda, of even 
this rather shadowy second edition of friendship. 

He had done his duty ; to hurt oneself badly seems 
a surety of having done one’s duty thoroughly. 

183 


CHAPTER VI 


H ilda drove home, with Palamon leaning his 
warm body against her feet as he sat on the 
floor of the cab. She put out her hand now and 
then and laid it on his head, but absently. She 
leaned back presently and closed her eyes, only 
rousing herself with a little start when the cab drew 
up with a jerk in the Rue Pierre Charron. Palamon 
stood dully on the pavement while she spoke to the 
cabman — but the monsieur had paid him, as Hilda 
had forgotten for the moment. Palamon was evi- 
dently tired too, and with a little turn of dread she 
wondered if the time would come when she must 
leave Palamon to a lonely day in the apartment. 
Mrs. Archinard did not like dogs near her. Kathe- 
rine was always out, and although Rosalie the cook 
was devoted to the tou-tou^ Hilda would miss him 
terribly and he would miss her. 

She said to herself that if it came to that she 
would allow herself a daily cab-fare rather than 
leave Palamon, and she toiled up the steep stairs 
carrying him. Taylor opened the door to her. 

“ Give me the dog. Miss Hilda ; you do look that 
tired. You are to go at once into the drawing-room. 
Miss. Lord Allan Hope has been waiting for some 
time.” 

Hilda was surprised to find that she had been 
184 


HILDA 


thinking of Palamon rather than of the ordeal before 
her. She felt calm now, perfectly, as she walked 
into the drawing-room, a little taken aback, however, 
to find Lord Allan there waiting for her and alone. 

Katherine was in the next room, her own pretty 
room, a rather perplexed smile of expectancy on her 
face. Taylor brought in Palamon, and Katherine 
gave him a drink and patted him kindly. Palamon 
would go with Hilda to her new home — dear old 
Palamon ! The thought of Hilda’s new home and 
homes — of the castle in Somersetshire and the 
shooting-lodge in Scotland, and the big house in 
Grosvenor Square, deepened the look of perplexity 
on Katherine’s brow. 

While Palamon lapped the water, she watched him 
with an expression of absent-minded concentration. 
She could hear nothing in the drawing-room, except 
now and then the slightly raised quiet of Allan 
Hope’s fine voice. Presently there was a long 
silence, and Katherine paused near the door. 

The quizzical lift of her eyebrows spoke her 
amused inquiry. She could hardly imagine Hilda 
allowing herself to be kissed, and as the silence con- 
tinued, Katherine felt a touch of impatience color 
her sisterly sympathy. Lord Allan’s voice, pitched 
on a deep note of pain, startled her. There followed 
quite a burst of ardent eloquence. With a little 
moue of self-disapproval Katherine bent her ear to 
the door. She heard Lord Allan quite distinctly. 
He was pleading in more desperate accents than she 
could have imagined possible from him, and Kathe- 
rine caught, too, the half frightened reiteration of 
Hilda’s voice : I can’t, I can’t ; really I can’t. I 

185 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


am so — so sorry, so sorry — ” The childishness of 
this helpless repetition brought a quick frown to 
Katherine’s brow. 

Little idiot ! Baby ! ” 

She straightened herself and stood staring at the 
gray houses across the way. Then, at renewed 
silence in the drawing-room, she walked to the mirror 
and looked at her amethyst-robed reflection. 

Her eyes lingered on the contour of her waist, the 
supple elegance of the line that fell gleaming from 
her hip. She met the half-shamed, half-daring 
glance of her deeply set eyes. The silence contin- 
ued, and Katherine walked out through the entrance 
and into the drawing-room. 

Hilda was sitting upright on a tall chair, looking 
at the floor with an expression of painful endurance, 
and Lord Allan stood looking at her. 

He turned his eyes almost unseeingly on Kathe- 
rine and remained silent, while Hilda rose and put 
out her hand to him. Hilda had no variety of 
metaphor ; “ I am so sorry,” she repeated. 

She left her hand in his for one moment and then 
passed swiftly out of the room. Katherine was left 
facing the unfortunate lover. Katherine showed 
great tact. 

Lord Allan, don’t mind me. Sit down for a 
moment. Perhaps then you may be able to tell 
me. Perhaps I can help you.” 

“ No good. Miss Archinard ; it’s all up with me.” 

Her gentle voice evidently turned aside the 
current of his frank despair. Instead of rushing out, 
he dropped on the sofa and looked at the carpet 
over his locked hands. 

1 86 


HILDA 


“ I am not going to talk to you for a little while.” 

The lamps were lighted and the tea-things all in 
readiness on the little table. Katherine lit the kettle 
and turned a log on the fire. Lord Allan’s silence 
implied a dull acquiescence. He did not move 
until Katherine came and sat down on the chair 
beside him. 

“ / am so sorry, too,” she said, with a sad little 
smile. “ Lord Allan, I thought she cared for you.” 

“ I hoped so.” 

“ And have you no more hope?” 

“ None — absolutely none. I tell you it ’s rough 
on a fellow. Miss Archinard. I — I adore that 
child.” 

“ Poor Lord Allan,” Katherine gently breathed. 
She stretched out her slim hand and laid it almost 
tenderly on his. Katherine was rather surprised 
at herself, and to herself her motives were rather 
confused. “ I should have liked you as a brother. 
Lord Allan.” 

“ You are awfully kind.” He lifted his dreary 
eyes and surveyed her absently, but with some 
gratitude. “ I suppose I had best be going,” he 
added suddenly, as if struck by the anti-climax of 
his position. 

No, no ; not unless you feel you must.” 
Katherine put out her hand again and detained his 
rising. “ I can’t bear to think of you going out 
alone like that into the cold. Just wait. You are 
bruised. Get back your breath. I am not going 
to be tiresome.” 

Lord Allan leaned back in the sofa with a long 
sigh, relapsing into the same half stunned silence, 

187 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


while Katherine moved about the tea-table, meas- 
uring out the tea from the caddy to the teapot, 
pouring on the boiling water, and pausing to wait 
for the tea to steep. Presently Lord Allan was 
startled by a proffered steaming cup. 

“Will you?” she said. “ I made it for you. It 
is such a chilly evening.” 

“ Oh, how awfully kind of you,” he started from 
his crushed recumbency of attitude, “ but you 
know I really cant ! ” But at the grieved gentle- 
ness of Katherine’s eyes he took the cup. “ It is 
too awfully kind of you. I do feel abominably 
chilly.” He gulped down the tea, and gave a half 
shame-faced smile as she took the cup for replen- 
ishment. 

“ No, don’t get up,” she urged, as he made an 
effort to collect his courtesy ; “ let me wait on you,” 
and she returned with a discreetly tempting plate of 
the thinnest bread and butter. She sat down be- 
side him again, looking into the fire with kind, sad 
eyes as she stirred her tea. She asked him pres- 
ently, in the same quietly gentle voice, some little 
question about the most recent debate in the 
House. Lord Allan had rather distinguished him- 
self in that debate ; it was on the crest of that 
wave of triumph that he had come to Hilda. From 
monosyllabic replies he was led on to a rather dole- 
ful recitation of his own prowess ; it seemed that 
Katherine had followed it all in the newspapers, so 
tactfully intelligent were her comments. He found 
himself sipping his third cup of tea, enjoying in a 
dreary way the expounding of his favorite political 
theories to the quiet, purple-robed figure beside 
i88 


HILDA 


him. He remembered that Miss Archinard had 
always been interested in his career ; she, of course, 
was the intellectual one, though Hilda’s beauty 
sent a sharp stab of pain through him as he made 
the comparison ; he appreciated now Miss Archi- 
nard’s kindness and sympathy with a brotherly 
warmth of gratitude. When he at last rose to go, 
he was dejected ; but no longer the crushed indi- 
vidual of an hour before. 

“You have been too good to a beaten man,” he 
said, taking her hand. 

“ Oh, Lord Allan, by the laws of compensation 
you must lose sometimes. Hilda, poor child, does n’t 
know what she has done ; she cannot know. Her 
little achievements bound the world for her. She 
does n’t see outside her studio walls. Your great 
world of action, true beneficent action, would stun 
her. Do you leave Paris directly. Lord Allan ? 
Yes ! Then won’t you write to me now and then? 
I am interested in you. I won’t relinquish the claim 
of ‘ it might have been.’ May I keep in touch with 
you — as a sister would ? ” 

“You are too good. Miss Archinard.” 

“ To an old friend ? A man I have followed and 
admired as I have you ? Lord Allan, I respect you 
from the bottom of my heart for the way in which 
you have borne this knock-down from fate. You 
are strong, it won’t hurt you in the end. Let me 
know how you get on.” 

Katherine’s eyes were compelling in their candid 
kindness. Lord Allan said that he would, with 
emphasis. As he went down the long staircase, 
the purple-robed figure filled his thoughts with a 
189 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


reviving beneficence. He felt that the blow was 
perhaps not so bad as he had imagined — might even 
be for the best ; better for him, for his career. 
Katherine’s words enveloped him in an atmosphere 
that was soothing. 

Left alone, Katherine finished her second cup of 
tea, and made, as she looked thoughtfully into the 
fire, a second little moue of self-disapprobation. 

190 


CHAPTER VII 


DD, as usual, found Katherine in the drawing- 



room when he called next morning. The 
Captain and Mrs. Archinard had assumed almost the 
aspect of illusions of late ; for the regularity of his 
daily routine — the morning spent with Katherine, 
and the afternoon with Hilda — excluded the hours 
of their appearance, and Odd was rather glad of the 
discovered immunity. 

Katherine was reading beside the fire, one slim 
sole tilted towards the blaze, and she looked round 
at Odd as he came in, without moving. Odd’s face 
wore a curiously strained expression, and, under it, 
seemed thinner, older than usual. He looked even 
haggard, Katherine thought. She liked his thin 
face. It satisfied perfectly her sense of fitness, as 
Odd did indeed. It offered no stupidities, no pre- 
tences of any kind for mockery to fasten on. The 
clever feminine eye is quick to remark the subtlest 
signs of fatuity or complacency. Katherine’s eye 
was very clever, and this morning, in looking at 
Odd, she was conscious of a little inner sigh. Kath- 
erine had asked herself more than once of late 
whether a husband, not only too superior for suc- 
cess, but morally her superior, might not make life 
a little wearing. Some such thought crossed her 
mind now as she met his eyes, and she realized that 


191 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


through Allan Hope’s discomfiture she herself was 
as wrongly placed as ever, and Hilda’s drudgery as 
binding. 

Indeed, several thoughts mingled with that gen- 
eral sense of malaise. 

One was that Allan Hope’s smooth, handsome 
face was rather fatuous ; the face that knows no 
doubts is in danger of seeming fatuous to a Kath- 
erine. 

Another thought held a keen conjecture on 
Peter’s haggard looks. 

She put out her hand to him, and, stooping over 
her, he kissed her with more tenderness than he 
always showed. Their engagement had left almost 
untouched the easy unsentimental attitude of earlier 
days. 

“Well,” he said, and Katherine understood and 
resented somewhat the quick attack of the absorb- 
ing subject. She shook her head. 

“ Bad news, Peter. Bad and very unexpected.” 

Odd stood upright and looked at her. 

“ Bad ! ” he repeated. 

“ She refused him,” Katherine said tersely, and 
her glance turned once more from the fire to Peter’s 
face. He looked at her silently. 

“ She is a foolish baby,” added Katherine. 

“She refused him — definitely?” 

“ Quite. She had to face the music last night, of 
course. Mamma and papa were rather — shabby — 
let us say, in their disinterested disappointment.” 
Odd flushed a little at the cool cynicism of Kath- 
erine’s tone. “ She told me, when I removed her 
from the battlefield, that she does n’t love him 
192 


HILDA 


and never will. So, of course, from every high and 
mighty point of view she is right, quite right.” 

Katherine’s eyes returned contemplatively to the 
fire. Odd was still silent. 

She ought to love him, of course ; that is where 
she is so foolish. I am afraid she has ruined her 
life. I love you, Peter, and he is every bit as good- 
looking as you are.” Katherine glanced at him with 
a sad and whimsical smile. Peter, certainly, was 
looking rather dazed. He stooped once more and 
kissed her. 

‘‘Thank you for loving me, Katherine.” 

“ You are welcome. It is a pity, is n’t it ? ” 

“Yes, it is” — Peter seated himself on the sofa, 
where Allan had sat the night before — “ an awful 
pity,” he added. “ I am astonished. I thought she 
cared for him.” 

“ So did I.” 

“ She cares for some one else, perhaps.” Odd 
locked his hands behind his head, and he too stared 
at the fire. 

“ There is no one else she could care for. I know 
Hilda’s outlook too well.” 

“ And she refused him,” he repeated musingly. 

“ Really, Peter, that sounds a little dull — not like 
you.” Katherine smiled at him. 

“ I feel dulled. I am awfully sorry. It would 
have been so satisfactory. And what ’s to be done 
now ? ” 

“ That is for you to suggest, Peter. My power 
over Hilda is very limited. You may have more 
influence.” 

“ She might come and live with us.” 

13 193 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


** That would be very nice,” Katherine assented, 
“ and it is very dear of you to suggest it.” 

Peter was conscious of sudden terrors that prompt- 
ed him to add with self-scorn — 

“ What would your mother do ? ” 

“ Without her ? I don’t know.” 

“ Of course,” Peter hastened to add, “ as far as 
money goes, you know ; you understand, dear, that 
your mother shall want nothing. But to rob her 
of the companionship of both daughters?” Peter 
rose and walked to the window. It needed some 
heroism, he thought, to put aside the idea of Hilda 
living with them ; he tried to pride himself on the 
renunciation, while under the poor crust of self- 
approbation lurked jibing depths of consciousness. 
Heroism would not lie in renunciation, but in living 
with her. The cowardice of his own retreat left 
him horribly shaken. 

Katherine watched him from her chair, calmly. 

“ But Hilda’s work must cease at once,” he 
said presently, finding a certain relief in decisive 
measures. “ She won’t show any false pride, I hope, 
about allowing me to put an end to it.” 

“ It would be like her,” said Katherine, sliding 
a sympathetic gloom of voice over the hard reality 
of her conclusions ; conclusions half angry, half 
sarcastic. Peter was dull after all. Katherine felt 
alarmed, humiliated, and amused, but she steeled 
herself inwardly to a calm contemplation of facts. 
She joined him at the window. “ What a burden 
you have taken on your poor shoulders, Peter.” 
Peter immediately put his arm around her waist, 
and, though Katherine felt a deeper humiliation, 
194 


HILDA 


she saw that alarm was needless ; a proof of Peter’s 
superiority, a proof, too, of his stupidity ; as her 
own most original and clever superiority was proved 
by the fact of her calm under humiliation. Could 
she accept that humiliation as the bitter drop in 
the cup of good things Peter had to offer her? 
Katherine asked herself the question ; it was an- 
swered by another. Just how far did the humilia- 
tion go ? Peter’s infidelity might be mere shal- 
low passag^re ; the fine part might be to 

feign blindness and help him out of it. Attendons 
summed up Katherine’s mental attitude at the 
moment. 

Don’t talk to me of burdens, dear Katherine,” 
said Peter. “ Don’t try to spoil my humble little 
pleasure. If I can make you and yours happier, 
what more can I ask?” He looked at her with 
kind, tired eyes. 

I won’t thwart you, but Hilda will.” 

Hilda will find it difficult when we are married. 
That must be soon, Katherine.” 

Katherine looked pensively out of the window. 

“ We will see,” she replied, with a pretty evasive- 
ness. 

It was fine and cold as Odd walked down the 
Boulevard St. Germain that afternoon. He walked 
at a tremendous pace, for human nature hopes to 
cheat thought by physical effort. Indeed, Peter did 
not think much, and was convinced that his mind 
was a comparatively happy blank as he paused 
before the tall house where Hilda was pursuing her 
avocations. If he made any definite reflections 
while he walked up and down between the doorway 

195 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


and the next corner, they were on his last few con- 
versations with Hilda; and then on rather abstract 
points merely. He had drawn the child out. He 
had penetrated the reserved mind that acquired 
for enjoyment, not for display. He had found out 
that Hilda knew Italian literature, from Dante to 
Leopardi, almost as well as he himself did, and loved 
it just as well. The fiction of Russia and Scandi- 
navia was deeply appreciated by her, and the essay- 
ists of France. Her tastes were as delicately dis- 
criminative as Katherine’s, but lacked that metallic 
assurance of which lately Peter had become rather 
uncomfortably aware. As for the English tongue, 
from the old meeting-ground of Chaucer they could 
range with delightful sympathy to Stevenson’s sweet 
radiance. 

Peter thought quite intently of this literary survey 
and evaded any trespassing beyond its limits. His 
reticence was not put to a prolonged test. Hilda 
met him before half-a-dozen trips to the corner were 
accomplished. She showed no signs of conscious 
guilt, though Peter was not sure that she was not a 
“ foolish baby.” 

“ Let us walk,” she said, “ it is such a lovely day.” 

** We will walk at least till the sun goes. We 
will just have time to catch the sunset on the Seine.” 

“ Yes ; what a lovely ! I wish I were ten, with 
short skirts, and a hoop, that I could run and roll.” 

“ You would like a bicycle ride. Come to-morrow 
with Katherine and me.” 

“ I can’t. Don’t think me a prig, but my model 
is due and I am finishing my picture. Thanks so 
much ; and this walk is almost as good.” 

196 


HILDA 


If Palamon is tired I will carry him, Hilda/* 

Oh, he is n’t tired. See how he pulls at his 
cord. The sunlight is getting into his veins. What 
delicious air.” 

The sunlight is getting into your veins too, 
Hilda. You are looking a little as you should look.” 

Hilda did not ask him how she should look. It 
was an original characteristic of Hilda’s that she 
did not seem at all anxious to talk about herself, 
and Odd continued, looking down at her profile — 

“ That ’s what you ought to have — sunlight. You 
are a little white flower that has grown in a shadow.” 
Hilda did not glance up at him ; she smiled rather 
distantly. 

“ What a sad simile ! ” 

** Is it a true one, Hilda ? ” 

“ I don’t think so. I never thought of myself in 
that sentimental light. I suppose to friendly eyes 
every life has a certain pathos.” 

“ No ; some lives are too evidently and merely 
flaunting in the sunlight for even friendly eyes to 
poetize — to sentimentalize, as you rather unkindly 
said.” 

“ Sunlight is poetic, too.” 

“ Success and selfishness, and all the common- 
places that make up a happy life, are not poetic.” 

That is rather morbid, you know — d^cadenty 

“ I don’t imply a fondness for illness and wrong- 
ness. Rather the contrary. It is a very beautiful 
rightness that keeps in the shade to give others the 
sunshine.” 

Hilda’s eyes were downcast, and in her look a 
certain pale reserve that implied no liking for these 
197 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


personalities — personalities that glanced from her to 
others, as Odd realized. 

He paused, and it was only after quite a little 
silence that Hilda said, with all her gentle quiet — 

“You must not imagine that I am unhappy, or 
that my life has been an unhappy life. It is very 
good of you to trouble about it, but I can’t claim 
the rather self-righteously heroic role you give me. 
I think it is others who live in the shadow. I think 
that any work, however feebly done, is a happy 
thing. I find so much pleasure in things other 
people don’t care about.” 

“Avery nicely delivered little snub, Hilda. You 
could n’t have told me to mind my own business 
more kindly.” Odd’s humorous look met her glance 
of astonished self-reproach. He hastened on, “ Will 
you try to find pleasure in a thing most girls do care 
for ? Will you go to the Meltons’ dance on Monday ? 
Katherine told me I must go, this morning, and I 
said I would try to persuade you.” 

“ I didnt mean to snub you.” 

“ Very well; convince me of it by saying you will 
come to the dance.” 

The girlish pleasure of her face was evident. 

“ Do you really want me to?” 

“ It would make me very happy.” 

“ It is against my rules, you know. I can’t get 
up at six and go out in the evening besides. But I 
will make an exception for this once, to show you I 
was n’t snubbing you ! And, besides, I should love 
to.” The gayety of her look suddenly fell to hesi- 
tation. “ Only I am afraid I can’t. I remember I 
have n’t any dress.” 


198 


HILDA 


Any dress will do, Hilda.” 

“ But I have n’t any dress. The gray silk is im- 
possible.” 

Peter’s mind made a most unmasculine excursion 
into the position. 

” But you were in London last year. You went 
to court. You must have had dresses.” 

“ Yes, but I gave them to Katherine when I came 
back. I had no need for them. Her own wore 
out, and mine fit her very well — a little too long 
and narrow, but that was easily altered. Perhaps 
the white satin would do, if it was n’t cut at the 
bottom ; it could be let down again, if it was only 
turned up. It is trimmed with mousseline de soie^ 
and the flounce would hide the line.” 

Peter stared at her look of thoughtful perplexity; 
he found it horribly touching. “ It might do.” 

“ It must do. If it does n’t, another of Kath- 
erine’s can be metamorphosized.” 

“ And you will dance with me ? I love dancing, 
and I don’t know many people. Of course Kath- 
erine will see that I am not neglected, but I should 
like to depend on you ; and if I am left sitting alone 
in a corner, I shall beckon to you. Will you be 
responsible for me ? ” Her smiling eyes met the 
badly controlled emotion of his look. 

** Hilda, you are quite frivolous.” Terms of reck- 
less endearment were on his lips ; he hardly knew 
how he kept them down. ‘‘ How shall I manoeuvre 
that you be left sitting alone in corners? Re- 
member that if the miracle occurs I shall come, 
whether you beckon or no.” 


199 


CHAPTER VIII 


DD was subtly glad of a cold that kept him in 



KJ bed and indoors for several days. He wrote 
of his sorry plight to Katherine, and said he would 
see her at the Meltons’ on Monday. Hilda was to 
come ; that had been decided on the very evening 
of their last walk. He had been a witness of the 
merry colloquy over the lengthened dress, a colloquy 
that might. Odd felt, have held an embarrassing 
consciousness for Katherine had she not treated it 
with such whole-hearted gayety. 

The Archinards had not yet arrived when Odd 
reached Mrs. Melton’s apartment — one of the most 
magnificent in the houses that line the Avenue du 
Bois de Boulogne — and after greeting his hostess, 
he waited for half-an-hour in a condition of feverish 
restlessness, painfully apparent to himself, before 
he saw in the sparkling distance Katherine’s smooth 
dark head, the Captain’s correctly impassive good 
looks, and Hilda’s loveliness for once in a setting 
that displayed it. Peter thrilled with a delicious 
and ridiculous pride as, with a susceptibility as 
acute as a fond mother’s, he saw — felt, even — the 
stir, the ripple of inevitable conquest spread about 
her entry. The involuntary attention of a con- 
course of people certainly constitutes homage, how^ 
ever unconscious of aim be the conqueror. To 


200 


HILDA 


Odd, the admiration, like the scent of a bed of helio- 
trope in the turning of a garden path, seemed to fill 
the very air with sudden perfume. Her dear little 
head,” Her lovely little head,” he was saying to 
himself as he advanced to meet her. He naturally 
spoke first to Katherine, and received her condo- 
lences on his cold, which she feared, by his jaded 
and feverish air, he had not got rid of. Then, turn- 
ing to Hilda — 

‘‘ The white satin does,"' he said, smiling down at 
her. Katherine did not depend on beauty, and need 
fear no comparison even beside her sister. She was 
talking with her usual quiet gayety to half-a-dozen 
people already. 

“ See that Hilda, in her e^nbarras de choix^ does n't 
become too much embarrassed,” she said to Peter. 
“ Exercise for her a brotherly discretion.” 

The Captain was talking to Mrs. Melton — a pretty 
little woman with languid airs. She had lived for 
years in Paris, and considered herself there a most 
necessary element of careful conservatism. Her 
exclusiveness, which she took au grand serieuXy 
highly amused Katherine. Katherine knew her 
world ; it was wider than Mrs. Melton s. She 
walked with a kindly ignoring of barriers, did not 
trouble herself at all how people arrived as long as 
they were there. She was as tolerant of a million- 
aire parvenu as might be a duchess with a political 
entourage to manipulate ; and she found Mrs. 
Melton’s anxious social self-satisfaction humorous 
— a fact of which Mrs. Melton was unaware, al- 
though she, like other people, thought Katherine 
subtly impressive. Mrs. Melton was rather dull 
201 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


too, and a few grievances whispered behind her fan 
in Katherine’s ear en passant — for subject, the un- 
fortunate and eternal nouveau riche — made pleasant 
gravity difficult ; but Katherine did not let Mrs. 
Melton know that she found her dull and funny. 

Hilda for the moment was left alone with Odd, 
and he seized the opportunity for inscribing himself 
for five waltzes. 

“ I will be greedy. I wrest these from the hungry 
horde I see advancing, led by your father and Mrs. 
Melton.” 

He had not claimed the first waltz, and watched 
her while she danced it — charmingly and happily 
as a girl should. She was beautiful, surprisingly 
beautiful. A loveliness in the carriage of the little 
head, with its heightened coils of hair, seemed new 
to Odd. No one else’s hair was done like that, nor 
grew so about the forehead. The white satin was 
a trifle too big for her. A lace sash held it loosely 
to her waist, and floated and curved with the curves 
of her long flowing skirt. His waltz came, and he 
would not let his wonder at the significance of his 
felicity carry him too far into conjecture. 

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked, as they 
joined the eddy circling around Mrs. Melton’s ball- 
room. 

“ So much ; thanks to you.” Her parted lips 
smiled, half at him, half at the joy of dancing. “ I 
had almost forgotten how delicious it was.” 

“ More delicious than the studio, is n’t it ? ” 

“ You shall not tempt me to disloyalty. How 
pretty, too ! De la Touche could do it — all light 
and movement and color. I should like to come 


202 


HILDA 


out of my demi-tints and have a try myself ! What 
pretty blue shadows everywhere with the golden 
lights. See on the girls’ throats. There is the 
good of the studio ! One sees lovely lights and 
shadows on ugly heads ! Is n’t that worth 
while ? ” 

Odd’s eyes involuntarily dropped to the blue 
shadow on Hilda’s throat. 

“ Everything you do is worth while — from paint- 
ing to dancing. You dance very well.” 

The white fragility of her neck and shoulders, in 
the generous display of which he recognized the 
gown’s quondam possessor, gave him a little pang 
of fear. She looked extremely delicate, and the 
youthfulness of cheek and lip pathetic. That 
wretched drudgery! For, even through the happy 
candor of her eyes, he saw a deep fatigue — the 
long fatigue of a weary monotony of days. But 
in neither eyes nor voice was there a tinge of the 
aloofness — the reserve that had formerly chilled 
him. To-night Hilda seemed near once more; 
almost the little friend of ten years ago. 

“You dance well, too, Mr. Odd,” she said. 

“ I very seldom waltz.” 

“In my honor then ? ” 

“ Solely in your honor. I have n’t waltzed five 
times in one evening with one young woman — for 
ages ! ” 

“ You have n’t waltzed five times with me yet. I 
may wear you out ! ” 

“ What an implied reflection on my forty years ! 
Do I seem so old to you, Hilda?” 

“ No ; I don’t think of you as old.” 

203 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


But I think of you as young, very young, deli- 
ciously young.” 

Deliciously ? ” she repeated. “ That is a fallacy, 
I think. Youth is sad ; doesn’t see things in value; 
everything is blacker or whiter than reality, so that 
one is disappointed or desperate all the time.” 

“ And you, Hilda? ” 

Her eyes swept his with a sweet, half-playful de- 
fiance. 

Don’t be personal.” 

“ But you were. And, after the other day — ^your 
declaration of contentment.” 

“ Everything is comparative. I was generalizing. 
I hate people who talk about themselves,” Hilda 
added; “ it’s the worst kind of immodesty. Material 
and mental braggarts are far more endurable than 
the people who go round telling about their souls.” 

“ Severe, rigid child ! ” Odd laughed, and, after a 
little pause, laughed again. “ You are horribly re- 
served, Hilda.” 

“ Very sage when one has nothing to show. 
Silence covers such a multitude of sins. If one is 
consistently silent, people may even imagine that 
one is n’t dull,” said Hilda maliciously. 

You are dull and silent, then ? ” 

“ I have few opinions ; that is, perhaps, dulness.” 

“ It may be a very wide cleverness.” 

Yes ; it may be. Now, Mr. Odd, the next waltz 
is yours too, you know. You have quite a cluster 
here. Let us sit out the next. I should like an 
ice.” 

Odd fetched the ice and sat down beside her on 
a small sofa in a corner of the ballroom. Katherine 
204 


HILDA 


passed, dancing ; her dark eyes flashed upon them 
a glance that might have been one of amusement. 
Odd was conscious of a painful effort in his answer- 
ing smile. 

Hilda’s eyes, as she ate her ice, followed her 
sister with a fond contemplation. 

“ Isn’t that dress becoming to her? The shade of 
deepening, changing rose.” 

‘‘Your dress, too, Hilda, is lovely.” 

“ Do you notice dresses, care about them ? ” 

“ I think I do, sometimes ; not in detail as a 
woman would, but in the blended effect of dress and 
wearer.” 

“ I love beautiful dresses. I think this dress is 
beautiful. Have you noticed the line it makes from 
breast to hem, that long, unbroken line ? I think 
that line the secret of elegance. In some gowns one 
sees one has visions of crushed ribs, don’t you think ? ” 

Odd listened respectfully, his mouth twisted a 
little by that same smile that he still felt to be pain- 
ful. “ And is not this lace gathered around the 
shoulders pretty too?” Hilda turned to him for 
inspection. 

“You will talk about your clothes, but you will 
not talk about yourself, Hilda.” Odd had put on 
his eyeglasses and was obediently studying her 
gown. 

“ The lace is mamma’s. Poor mamma ; I know 
she is lonely. It does seem hard to be left alone 
when other people are enjoying themselves. She 
has Meredith’s last novel, however. I began it with 
her. Mr. Odd, I am doing all the talking. You 
talk now.” 


205 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


‘‘About Meredith, your dress, or you?” 

“ About yourself, if you please.” 

“ It has seemed to me, Hilda, that you were even 
less interested in me than you were in yourself.” 

Hilda looked round at him quickly, and he felt 
that his eyes held hers with a force which almost 
compelled her — 

“ No ; I am very much interested in you.” Odd 
was silent, studying her face with much the same 
expression that he had studied her gown — the ex- 
pression of painfully controlled emotion. 

“ There is nothing comparably interesting in me,” 
he said ; “ I have had my story, or at least I have 
missed my chance to have a story.” 

“ What do you mean ? ” 

“ Well, I mean that I might have made a mark in 
the world and didn’t.” 

“ And your books ? ” 

“ They are as negative as I am.” 

“ Yet they have helped me to live.” Hilda looked 
hard at him while she spoke, and a sudden color 
swept into her face ; no confusion, but the emo- 
tion of impulsive resolution. Odd, however, turned 
white. 

“ Helped you to live, Hilda ! ” he almost stam- 
mered ; “ my gropings ! ” 

“You may call them gropings, but they led me. 
Perhaps you were like Virgil to Statius, in Dante. 
You know? You bore your light behind and lit 
my path ! ” She smiled, adding : “ I suppose you 
think you have failed because you have reached no 
dogmatic absolute conclusion. But you yourself 
praise noble failure and scorn cheap success.” 

206 


HILDA 


“ I did n’t even know you read my books.” 

“ I know your books very well ; much better than 
I know you.” 

Don’t say that. I hope that any worth in me is 
in them.” 

“ One would have to survey your life as a whole 
to be sure of that. Perhaps you do even better than 
you write.” 

Ah, no, no ; I can praise the books by that com- 
parison.” His voice stumbled a little incoherently, 
and Hilda, rising, said with a smile — 

Shall we dance ? ” 

In the terribly disquieting whirl of his thoughts, 
which shared the dance’s circling propensities. Odd 
held fast to one fixed kernel of desire ; he must hear 
from Hilda’s lips why she had refused Allan Hope. 

An uneasy consciousness of Katherine crossed 
his mind once and again with a dull ache of self- 
reproach, all the more insistent from his realization 
that its cause was not so much the infidelity to 
Katherine as that Hilda would think him a sorry 
villain. 

Katherine seemed to be dancing and enjoying 
herself. She knew that his energy this evening was 
on Hilda’s account ; he had claimed the responsi- 
bility for Hilda. Katherine would not consider 
herself neglected, of that Peter felt sure, relying, 
with perhaps a display of the dulness she had dis- 
covered in him, upon her confidence and common 
sense. Outwardly, at least, he would never betray 
that confidence ; there was some rather dislocated 
consolation in that. 

Hilda was a little breathless when he came to 
207 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


claim her for the second cluster of waltzes. It was 
near the end of the evening. 

“ I have been dancing steadily!' she announced, 
“and twice down to supper! Did you try any of 
the narrow little sandwiches ? So good ! ” 

“ And you still don’t grudge me my waltzes ? ” 

“ I like yours best ! ” she said, smiling at him as 
she laid her hand on his shoulder. They took a 
few turns around the room and then Hilda owned 
that she was a little tired. They sat down again 
on the sofa. 

“ Hilda ! ” said Odd suddenly, “ will you think 
me very rude if I ask you why you refused Allan 
Hope?” 

Hilda turned a startled glance upon him. 

“ No ; perhaps not,” she answered, though the 
voice was rather frigid. 

“ You don’t think I have aright to ask, do you ?” 

“ Well, the answer is so evident.” 

“ Is it ?” Hilda had looked away at the dancers; 
she turned her head now half unwillingly and glanced 
at him, smiling. 

“ I would not have refused him if I had loved 
him, would I ? You know that. It doesn’t seem 
quite fair, quite kind, to talk of, does it?” 

“Not to me even? I have been interested in it 
for a long time. Katherine told me, and Mary.” 

“ I don’t know why they should have been so 
sure,” said Hilda, with some hardness of tone. “ I 
never encouraged him. I avoided him.” She 
looked at Odd again. “ But I am not angry with 
you ; if any one has a right, you have.” 

^‘Thanks; thanks, dear. You understand, you 
208 


HILDA 


kno\^ my interest, my anxiety. It seemed so — 
happy for both. And you care for no one else ? ” 

“ No one else.” Hilda’s eyes rested on his with 
clear sincerity. 

“ Don’t you ever intend to marry, Hilda ? ” Odd 
was leaning* forward, his elbows on his knees, and 
looking at the floor. There was certainly a tension 
in his voice, and he felt that Hilda was scanning 
him with some wonder. 

“ Does a refusal to take one person imply that ? 
I have made no vows.” 

“ I don’t see — ” Odd paused ; “ I don’t see why 
you should n’t care for Hope.” 

Are you going to plead his cause?” she asked 
lightly. 

“ Would it not be for your happiness ? ” Odd sat 
upright now, putting on his eyeglasses and looking 
at her with a certain air of resolution. 

I don’t love him.” Hilda returned the look 
sweetly and frankly. 

“What do you know of love, you child? Why 
not have given him a chance, put him on trial? 
Nothing wins a woman like wooing.” 

“ How didactic we are becoming. I am afraid I 
should really get to loathe poor Lord Allan if I had 
given him leave to woo me.” 

“ I suppose you think him too unindividual, too 
much of a pattern with other healthy and hearty 
young men. Don’t you know, foolish child, that a 
good man, a man who would love you as he would, 
make you the husband he would, is a rarity and very 
individual ? ” 

Odd found a perverse pleasure in his own pater- 
14 209 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


nally admonishing attitude. Hilda’s lightly amused 
but touched look implied a confidence so charming 
that he found the attitude sublimely courageous. 

“ I suppose so,” she said, and she added, “ I 
have n’t one word to say against Lord Allan, ex- 
cept — ” She paused meditatively. 

“ Except what ? ” Odd asked rather breathlessly. 

“ He doesn’t really need me.” 

Does n’t need you ! Why, the man is desper- 
ately in love with you ! ” 

He needs a wife, but he does n’t need me"' 

“ You are subtle, Hilda.” 

“ I don’t think I am that." 

*‘You are waiting, then, for some one who can 
satisfy you as to his need of you ? ” 

I shall only marry that person.” 

Hilda jumped up. “ But I’m not waiting at all, 
you know. Dansons maintenant ! Your task is 
nearly over ! ” 

It was very late when Odd gave Hilda up to her 
last partner, and joined Katherine in a small ante- 
chamber, where she was sitting among flowers, talk- 
ing to an appreciative Frenchman. This gentleman, 
with the ceremonious bow of his race, made away 
when Miss Archinard’s fianc^ appeared, and Odd 
dropped into the vacated seat with a horrible sinking 
of the heart. The dull self-reproach was now acute. 
He felt meanly guilty. Katherine looked at him 
funnily — very good-humoredly. 

** I did n’t know you had it in you to dance so 
well and so persistently, Peter. You have done 
honor to Hilda’s ball.” 

“ I hope I was n’t too selfishly monopolizing.” 

210 


HILDA 


“ Oh, you had a right to a certain monopoly since, 
owing to you only, she came,” and Katherine added, 
smiling still more good-humoredly, “ am not jeal- 
ous, Peter.” 

He turned to look at her. The words, the play- 
ful tone in which they were uttered, struck him like 
a blow. His guilty consciousness of his own feel- 
ing gave them a supreme nobility. She was not 
jealous. What a cur he would be if ever he gave 
her apparent cause for jealousy. The cause was 
there ; his task must be to keep it hidden. 

‘‘ But suppose I am ? ” he said ; “ you have n’t 
given me a single dance.” 

Katherine’s smile was placid ; she did not say 
that he had not asked for one. Indeed they had 
rarely danced together. 

‘‘ I think of going to England in a day or two, 
Peter,” she observed. The Devreuxs have asked 
me to spend a month with them.” 

Peter sat very still. 

“A sudden decision, Kathy?” 

“ No, not so sudden. Our tite-h-tite can’t be pro- 
longed forever. ” 

“ Until our wedding day, you mean? Well, the 
wedding day must be fixed before you go.” 

I yield. The first part of May.” 

Three months ! Let it be April at least, Kathy.” 

No, I am for May.” 

It ’s an unlucky month.” 

'' Oh, we can defy bad luck, can’t we ? ” Kath- 
erine smiled. 

If you go away, I shall,” said Odd, after a mo- 
ment’s silence. 

2II 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“ Why, I thought you would stay here and look 
after mamma — and Hilda,” said Katherine slowly, 
and with a wondering thought for this revealment 
of poor Peter’s folly. Peter then intended to heroic- 
ally sacrifice his infidelity. That he should think 
she did not see it ! 

“ I am not over this beastly cold yet. A trip 
through Provence would set me right. I should 
come back through Touraine just at the season 
of lilacs. I am afraid I should be useless here in 
Paris. I see so little of your mother — and Hilda. 
Arrange that Taylor shall go for her after her 
lessons.” 

‘‘ I am afraid that mamma can’t spare Taylor.” 

Peter moved impatiently. 

“ Katherine, may I give you some money ? She 
would take it from you. Persuade her to give up 
that work. You could do it delicately.” 

** As I have told you, you exaggerate my influ- 
ence. She would suspect the donor. She would 
not take the money. 

“ I could speak to your father ; lend him a sum.” 

Katherine flushed. 

“ It would make him very angry with her if he 
knew. And the lessons are a fixed sum ; only a 
steady income would be the equivalent.” 

“ Oh dear ! ” sighed Peter. He suddenly realized 
that of late he had talked of little else but Hilda in 
his conversations with Katherine. 

“ When do you go to London, dear?” he asked. 

“ The day after to-morrow.” Katherine, above the 
waving of her fan, smiled slightly at his change of 
tone. “Will you miss me, Peter?” 

212 


HILDA 


** All the more for being cross with you. It is 
very wrong of you to play truant like this.” 

“ It will be good for both of us.” Katherine’s 
voice was playful, and showed no trace of the bitter- 
ness she was feeling. “ I might get tired of you, 
Peter, if I allowed myself no interludes. Absence 
is the best fuel to appreciation. I shall come back 
realizing more fully than ever your perfection.” 

“ What a sage little person it is ! Sarcastic as 
well ! May I write to you very often ?” 

‘‘As often as you feel like it; but don’t force 
feeling.” 

“ May I describe chateaux and churches ? And 
will you read my descriptions if I do ? ” 

“ With pleasure — and profit. Let me know, too, 
how the book gets on. Can I do anything for you 
at the British Museum ? ” 

It struck Katherine that the change in their rela- 
tion which she now contemplated as very probably 
definite might well allow of a return to the first 
phase of their companionship. A letter from Allan 
Hope which she had received that morning, though 
satisfactory in many respects, was not quite so from 
an intellectual standpoint. An intellectual friend- 
ship with Peter Odd was a pleasant possession for 
any woman, and Katherine perhaps, with an excus- 
able malice, rather anticipated the time when Peter 
might have regrets, and find in that friendship the 
solace of certain disappointments from which Kath- 
erine had almost decided not to withhold him. 

“ I shall try to keep you profitably yoked, then, 
even in London, shall I ? ” said Odd, in reply to an 
offer more generous than he could have divined. 
213 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“ Discipline is good for a rebellious spirit like yours. 
Don’t be frightened, Kathy. Go and look at the 
Elgin Marbles if you like. I shall set you no heavier 
task.” 

“They are so profoundly melancholy in their 
cellared respectable abode, poor dears ! I know 
they would have preferred dropping to pieces under 
a Greek sky. A cruel kindness to preserve them in 
an insulting immortality. The frieze especially, 
stretched round the ugly wall like a butterfly under 
a glass case ! ” Odd laughed with more light-heart- 
edness than he had felt for some time. It rejoiced 
him to feel that he still found Katherine charming. 
There must certainly be safety in that affectionate 
admiration. 

“ I won’t even ask you to harrow your suscepti- 
bility by a look at the insulted frieze, then ; you 
must know it well, to enter with such sympathy into 
its feelings. Only you must write, Katherine. I 
shall be lonely down there. A daily letter would be 
none too many.” 

“ I can’t quite see why you are exiling yourself. 
Of course, the weather here is nasty just now. I 
have noticed your cough all the evening. Come and 
say good-bye to-morrow. I shall be very busy, so 
fix your hour.” 

“ Our usual hour ? In the morning ? ” 

“You will not see Hilda then.” 

“ Hilda has had enough of me to-night, I am sure. 
You will kiss her au revoir for me.” 

Odd felt a certain triumph. 

Katherine’s departure could be taken as a merciful 
opportunity for makeshift flight. After a month or 
214 


HILDA 


two of solitary wrestling and wandering, he might 
find that the dubiously directed forces of Providence 
were willing to help one who helped himself. 

His mind fastened persistently on the details of 
the suddenly entertained idea of escape from the 
madness he felt closing round him. The disclosure 
of his passion for Hilda stared him in the face. 
And how face the truth ? A man may fight a dis- 
honoring weakness, but how fight the realization 
that a love founded on highest things, stirring 
highest emotions in him, had, for the first time, 
come into his life, and too late? A love as far 
removed from the wrecking passion of his youth as 
it was from the affectionate rationality of his feeling 
toward Katherine ; and yet, because of that tie, 
drifted into from a lazy indifference and kindness 
for which he cursed himself, capable of bringing 
him to a more fearful shipwreck. 

Hilda’s selflessness was rather awful to the man 
who loved her, and gave her a power of clear per- 
ception that made sinking in her eyes more to be 
dreaded than any hurt to himself. 

And Peter departed for the South without seeing 
her again. 


215 


CHAPTER IX 



N April sky smiled over Paris on the day of 


JTjl Odd’s return. A rather prolonged tour had 
tanned his face, and completely cured his lungs. 

He expected to find Katherine already in Paris ; 
her last letters had announced her departure from a 
Surrey country house, and had implied some anxiety 
in regard to a prolonged illness of Mrs. Archinard’s. 
Katherine had written him very soon after their 
parting, that the Captain had gone on a yachting 
trip in the Mediterranean, and that she knew that 
he had left Hilda with money, so Peter need not 
worry. Peter had seen to this matter before leaving 
Paris, and had approved of the Captain’s projected 
jaunt. He surmised that her father’s absence would 
lighten Hilda’s load, and hoped that the sum he 
placed in the Captain’s hands — on the understanding 
that most of it was to be given to Hilda — but frojn 
her father, would relieve her from the necessity for 
teaching. Peter called at the Rue Pierre Charron 
early in the afternoon, but the servant (neither 
Taylor nor Wilson, but a more hybrid-looking in- 
dividual with unmistakable culinary traces upon her 
countenance) told him that Mademoiselle Archinard 
had not yet arrived. Madame still in bed “ toujour s 
souffrante^' and “Mademoiselle ’Ilda” — Odd had 


216 


HILDA 


hesitated uncomfortably before asking for her — 
was out. Pas bien non plus, celle-lhp she volun- 
teered, with a kindly French familiarity that still 
more strongly emphasized the contrast with Taylor 
and Wilson; Elle s'^reinte, voyez-vous monsieur, la 
pauvre demoiselleP With a sick sense of calamity 
and helplessness upon him, Odd asked at what hours 
she might be found. All the morning, it seemed 
“ II faut bien qu elle soigne madame, et puis elle ml aide, 
Je suis seule et la besogne set ait par troplourde^' and 
Rosalie also volunteered the remark that “ Madame 
est trh, mais trh exigeante, 7iuit et jour ; pas moyen 
de dormir avec une dame comme celle-lhl'' 

Odd looked at his watch ; it was almost five. If 
Hilda had kept to her days he should probably find 
her in the Rue d’Assas, and, with the angriest feel- 
ings for himself and for the whole Archinard family, 
Hilda excepted, he was driven there through a sud- 
den shower that scudded in fretful clouds across the 
blue above. He was none too soon, for he caught 
sight of Hilda half-way up the street as they turned 
the corner. The sight of him, as he jumped out of 
the cab and waylaid her, half dazed her evidently. 

You ? I can hardly believe it ! ” she gasped, 
smiling, but in a voice that plainly showed over- 
wrought mental and physical conditions. She was 
wofully white and thin ; the hollowed line of her 
cheek gave to her lips a prominence pathetically, 
heartrendingly childlike ; her clothes had reached 
a pitch of shabbiness that could hardly claim gen- 
tility ; the slits in her umbrella and the battered 
shapelessness of her miserable little hat symbolized 
a biting poverty. 


217 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


Hilda ! Hilda! ” was all Odd found to say as he 
put her into the cab. He was aghast. 

“ I am glad to see you,” she said, and her voice 
had a forced gayety over its real weakness ; “ I 
have n’t seen any of my people for so long, except 
mamma. An illness seems to put years between 
things, does n’t it ? Poor mamma has been so really 
ill. It has troubled me horribly, for I could not tell 
whether it were grave enough to bring back papa 
and Katherine ; but Katherine is coming. I ex- 
pected her a day or two ago, and mamma is much, 
much better. As for papa, the last time I heard 
from him he was in Greece and going on to Constan- 
tinople. I am glad now that he has n’t been need- 
lessly frightened, for he will get all my last letters 
together, and will hear that she is almost well 
again. And you are here ! And Kathy coming ! I 
feel that all my clouds are breaking.” 

Odd could trust his voice now ; her courage, 
strung as he felt it to be over depths of dreadful 
suffering, nerved him to a greater self-control. 

“ If I had known I would have come sooner,” he 
said ; you would have let me help you, would n’t 
you ? ” 

“ I am afraid you could n’t have helped me. That 
is the worst of illness, one can only wait ; but you 
would have cheered me up.” 

“ My poor child ! ” Odd inwardly cursed him- 
self. “If I had known I What have you been 
doing to yourself, Hilda? You look — ” 

“ Fagged, don’t I ? It is the anxiety ; I have 
given up half my work since you left ; my pictures 
are accepted at the Champs de Mars. We ’ll all 
218 


HILDA 


go to the vernissage together. And, as they were 
done, I let Miss Latimer have the studio for the 
whole day. That left me my mornings free for 
mamma.” 

“ Taylor helped you, I suppose ? ” 

Taylor is with Katherine. She went before 
mamma was at all ill, and indeed mamma insisted 
that Katherine must have her maid. I was glad that 
she should go, for she has worked hard without a 
rest for so long, and, of course, travelling about as 
she has been doing, Katherine needed her.” There 
was an explanatory note in Hilda’s voice ; indeed 
Odd’s silence, big with comment, gave it a touch of 
defiance. It made double duty for Rosalie, but 
she is a good, willing creature, and has not minded.” 

“ And Wilson ? ” 

“ He went with papa. I don’t think papa could 
live without Wilson.” 

“ Oh, indeed. I begin to solve the problem of 
your ghastly little face. You have been house- 
maid, garde-malade^ and bread-winner. Had you 
no money at all ? ” Hilda flushed — the quick flush 
of physical weakness. 

Yes, at first,” she replied ; “ papa gave me quite 
a lot before going, and that has paid part of the 
doctor’s bills, and my lessons brought in the usual 
amount.” 

“ Could you not have given up the lessons for 
the time being? ” 

I know you think it dreadful in me to have left 
mamma for all those afternoons.” Her acceptation 
of a blame infinitely removed from his thoughts 
stupefied Odd. ‘‘ And mamma has thought it heart- 
219 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


less, most naturally. But Rosalie is trustworthy 
and kind. The doctor came three times a day and 
I can explain to you ” — H ilda hesitated — “ the money 
papa gave me went almost immediately — some un- 
paid bills.” 

What bills ? ” Odd spoke sternly. 

‘‘Why, we owe bills right and left ! ” said Hilda. 

“ But what bills were these ? ” 

“ There was the rent of the apartment for one 
thing ; we should have had to go had that not been 
paid ; and then, some tailors, a dressmaker ; they 
threatened to seize the furniture.” 

“ Katherine’s dressmaker? ” 

“Yes; Katherine, I know, never dreamed that 
she would be so impatient ; but I suppose, on hear- 
ing that Katherine had gone to England, the woman 
became frightened.” Peter controlled himself to 
silence. The very fulness of Hilda’s confidence 
showed the strain that had been put upon her. 
“And then,” she went on, as he did not speak, 

“ some of the money had to go to Katherine in 
England. Poor Kathy ! To be pinched like that ! 
She wrote, that at one place it took her last shilling 
to tip the servants and get her railway ticket to 
Surrey.” 

“ Why did she not write to me ? Considering all 
things — ” 

“ Oh ! ” said Hilda — her tone needed no comment 
— “ we have not quite come to that.” She added 
presently and gently, “ I had money for her.” 

Odd took her hand and kissed it ; the glove was ■ 
loose upon it. 

“ And now,” said Hilda, leaning forward and 
220 


HILDA 


smiling at him, “you have heard me filer mon chape- 
let. Tell me what you have been doing.” 

“ My lazy wanderings in the sun would sound too 
grossly egotistic after your story.” 

“ Has my story sounded so dismal? /have been 
egotistic, then. I had hoped that perhaps you 
would write to me,” she added, and a delicately 
malicious little smile lit her face. Odd looked hard 
at her, with a half-dreamy stare. 

“ I thought of you,” he said ; “ I should have 
liked to write.” 

“Well, in the future do, please, when you feel 
like it.” 

Mrs. Archinard was extended on the sofa in the 
drawing-room when they reached the Rue Pierre 
Charron. The crisp daintiness of pseudo-invalidism 
had withered to a look of sickly convalescence. 
She was much faded, and her little air of melan- 
choly affectation pitifully fretful. 

“You come before my own daughter, Peter,” she 
said ; “ I don’t blame Katherine, since Hilda tells 
me that she did not let her know of my dangerous 
condition.” 

“ Not danger ouSy mamma,” Hilda said, with a 
patient firmness not untouched by resentment, a 
touch to Odd most new and pleasing. “ The doctor 
had perfect confidence in me, and would have told 
me. I should have sent for papa and Katherine the 
moment he thought it advisable. Under the cir- 
cumstances they could have done nothing for you 
that I did not do.” Hilda had, indeed, rather dis- 
torted facts to shield Katherine. What would Mrs. 
Archinard have said had she known that Katherine, 
221 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


in answer to a letter begging her to return, had re- 
plied that she could not? Even in Hilda’s chari- 
table heart that could not” had rankled. Odd’s 
despairing gloom discerned something of this truth, 
as he realized that the uncharacteristic self-justifica- 
tion was prompted by a rebellion against misinter- 
pretation before^/;;/. Mrs. Archinard showed some 
nervous surprise. 

Very well, very well, Hilda,” she said, “I am 
sure I ask no sacrifices on my account. One may 
die alone as one has lived — alone. My life has 
trained me in stoicism. You had better wash your 
face, Hilda. There is a great smudge of charcoal 
on your cheek,” and, as Hilda turned and walked 
out, I have looked on the face of the King of Ter- 
rors, Peter. Peter ! dear old homely name ! the 
faithful ring in it ! It is easy for Hilda to talk ! I 
make no complaint. She has nursed me excellently 
well — as far as her nursing went. But she has a 
hard soul ! no tenderness ! no sympathy ! To leave 
her dying mother every afternoon ! To sacrifice 
me to her painting! At such a time! Ah me!” 
Large tears rolled down Mrs. Archinard’s cheeks, 
and her voice trembled with weakness and self-pity. 
Odd, in his raging resentment, could have exploded 
the truth upon her ; the tears arrested his impulse, 
and he sat moodily gazing at the floor. Mrs. 
Archinard raised her lace-edged handkerchief and 
delicately touched away the tears. 

“ I have given my whole life, my whole life, 
Peter, for my girls ! I have borne this long exile 
from my home for their sakes ! ” At Allersley Mrs. 
Archinard had never ceased complaining of her re- 
222 


HILDA 


stricted lot, and had characterized her neighbors as 
yokels and Philistines.” Speaking with her hand- 
kerchief pressed by her finger-tips upon her eyelids, 
she continued, ** I have asked nothing of them but 
sympathy ; that I have craved ! And in my hour 
of need — ” Mrs. Archinard’s point de Venise bosom 
heaved once more. Odd took her hand with the un- 
willing yet pitying kindness one would show towards 
a silly and unpleasant child. 

“ I don’t think you are quite fair,” he said ; 
“ Hilda looks as badly as you do. She has had a 
heavy load to carry.” 

“ I told her again and again to get a garde- 
malade^ two if necessary.” Mrs. Archinard’s voice 
rose to a higher key. ** She has chosen to ruin her 
appearance by sitting up to all hours of the night, 
and by working all day in that futile studio.” 

“ Garde-malades are expensive.” Odd could not 
restrain his voice’s edge. 

‘‘ Expensive ! For a dying mother ! And with 
all that is lavished on her studio — canvases, paints, 
models ! ” 

The depths of misconception were too hopelessly 
great, and, as Mrs. Archinard’s voice had now be- 
come shrilly emphatic, he kept silence, his heart 
shaken with misery and with pity, despairing pity 
for Hilda. She re-entered presently, wearing on 
her face too evident signs of contrition. She spoke 
to her mother in tones of gentle entreaty, humored 
her sweetly, gayly even, while she made tea. 

“ You know I cannot touch cake, Hilda.” 

There are buttered briocheSy mamma, piping hot.” 

“ Properly buttered, I hope. Rosalie usually 
223 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


places a great clot in the centre, leaving the edges 
uneatable.” 

“ Mamma is like the princess who felt the pea 
through all the dozens of mattresses, isn’t she?” 
said Hilda, smiling at Odd. “ But I buttered these 
with scientific exactitude.” 

“ Exactitude ! Ah ! the mirage of science ! More 
milk, more milk ! ” Mrs. Archinard raised herself 
on one elbow to watch with expectant disapproval 
the concoction of her tea, and, relapsing on her 
cushions as the tea was brought to her, “ I suppose 
it is milk, though I prefer cream.” 

“ No, it ’s cream.” Hilda should know, as she had 
herself just darted round the corner to the crhnerie. 
Odd sprang up to take his cup from her. He thought 
she looked in danger of falling to the ground. 

“ Do sit down,” he said in a low voice ; “ you look 
very, very badly.” 

Have you read Meredith’s last ? ” asked Mrs. 
Archinard from the sofa. Hilda is reading it to 
me in the evenings. We began it, ah! long, long 
ago. I have sympathy for Meredith, an intimiU ! 
It is so I feel, see things — super-subtly. Strange 
how coarsely objective some minds are I Did you 
order the oysters for my dinner, Hilda, and the ice 
from Gage’s — pistache ? I hope you impressed 
pistache. You will dine with Hilda, of course, 
Peter ; I have my dinner here ; I am not yet strong 
enough to sit through a meal. And then you must 
talk to me about Meredith. I always find you most 
suggestive — such new lights on old things. And 
Verhaeren, too ; do you care for Verhaeren? Mor- 
bid? Yes, perhaps, but that is a truism — not like 
224 


HILDA 


you, Peter. ^ Les apparus dans mes chemins^ poor, 
modern, broken, bleeding soul ! We must talk of 
Verhaeren. Just now I feel very sleepy. You will 
excuse me if I simply sa7is gine turn over and take 
a nap ? I can often sleep at this hour. Hilda, show 
Peter the Burne-Jones Chaucer over there. Hilda 
does n’t find him limpid, sweet, healthy enough for 
Chaucer; but nous sommes tons les enfants malades 
nowadays. There is a beauty, you know, in that. 
Talk it over.” 

Hilda and Peter sat down obediently side by side 
on the distant little canape before the Burne-Jones 
Chaucer. They went over the pages, not paying 
much attention to the woodcuts, but looking down 
favorite passages together. The description of 

my swete ” in “ The Book of the Duchess,” the 
complaint of poor Troilus, and, once more, Arcite’s 
death. The quiet room was very quiet, and they 
looked up from the pages now and then to smile, 
perhaps a little sadly, at one another. When the 
dinner was announced Hilda said, as they went into 
the dining-room — 

“ If your courage fails you, just say so frankly. 
I have very childish tastes and childish fare.” 

Indeed, half a cold chicken and a dish of rice 
constituted the repast. A bottle of claret stood by 
Odd’s place, and there was a white jar filled with 
buttercups on the table ; but even Rosalie seemed 
depressed by the air of meagreness, and gave them 
a rather effar^ glance as they sat down. Odd sus- 
pected that the cold chicken was in his honor. He 
had come to the conclusion that Hilda was capable 
of dining off rice alone. 

15 225 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


** Delightful ! ” he said. The chicken and rice 
were indeed very good, but Hilda saw that he ate 
very little. 

“ I make no further apologies,” she said, smiling 
at him over the buttercups ; your hunger be upon 
your own head.” 

I am not hungry, dear.” 

Hilda had to do most of the talking, but they 
were both rather silent. It was a happy silence to 
Hilda, full of a loving trust. 

When he spoke, it was in a voice of the same 
gentle fatigue that his eyes showed ; but as the eyes 
rested upon her she felt that the past and the present 
had surely joined hands. 

226 


CHAPTER X 


O DD went in the same half-dreamy condition 
through the morning of the next day. He 
walked and read, but where he walked and what he 
read he could hardly have told. 

He was to fetch Hilda from the Rue d’Assas and 
go home to tea and dinner with her. His love for 
Hilda had now reached such solemn heights that 
his late flight seemed degrading. 

So loving her, he could not be base. 

The Rue d’Assas was dreary in a fine drizzling 
rain. In the Luxembourg Gardens the first young 
green made a mist upon the trees. 

It was only half-past four when Odd reached his 
accustomed post, but hardly had he taken a turn 
up and down the street when he saw Hilda come 
quickly from the Lebon abode. She was fully half- 
an-hour early, but Odd had merely time to note 
the fact before seeing in a flash that Hilda was in 
trouble. She looked, she almost ran toward him ; 
and he met her half-way with outstretched hands. 

O Peter!” It was the first time she had used 
his name, and Odd’s heart leaped as her hands 
caught his with a sort of desperate relief. ** Come, 
come,” she said, taking his arm. “ Let us go 
quickly.” Peter's heart after its leap began to 
thump fast. The white distress of her face gave 
227 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


him a dizzy shock of anger. What, who had dis- 
tressed her? He asked the question as they 
crossed the road and entered the gardens. Tears 
now streamed down her face. 

He had only once before seen Hilda weep, and 
as she hung shaken with sobs on his arm, the past 
child, the present Hilda merged into one ; his one, 
his only love. 

“ Let us walk here, dear,” he said ; “ you will be 
quieter.” 

The little path down which they turned was 
empty, and the fine rain enveloped but hardly wet 
them. They came to a bench under a tree, circled 
by an unwet area of sanded path. Odd led the 
weeping girl to it and they sat down. She still held 
his arm tightly. 

“ Now, what is it ? ” 

“ O Peter ! I can hardly tell you ! The brother, 
the horrible brother.” 

“Yes?” Peter felt the accumulations of rage 
that had been gathering for months hurrying for- 
ward to spring upon, to pulverize “ the brother.” 

“ He made love to me, said awful things! ” Odd 
whitened to the lips. 

“ Tell me all you can.” 

“ I wish I were dead ! ” sobbed Hilda, “ I am so 
unhappy.” 

Peter did not trust himself to speak ; he took her 
hand and held it to his lips. 

“Yes; you care,” said Hilda. She drew herself 
up and wiped her eyes. “ I never thought he 
would be unpleasant. At times I fancied that he 
came a good deal into the studio where we worked 
228 


HILDA 


and, behind his sister’s back, looked silly. But he 
never really annoyed me. I thought myself un- 
kindly suspicious. To-day Mademoiselle Lebon 
was called away and he came in. I went on paint- 
ing. I did not dream — ! When, suddenly he 
put his arms around me — and tried to kiss me ! ” 
Hilda gave an hysterical laugh. “ Do you know, I 
had my palette on my hand, and I gave him a great 
blow with it ! You should have seen his head ! 
Oh, to think that I can find that funny now ! His 
ear was covered with cobalt ! ” Hilda sobbed 
again, even while she laughed. “ He was very angry 
and horrible. I said I would call his mother and 
sister if he did not leave me at once, and then — 
and then” — Hilda dropped her face into her hands 
— “ he jeered at me ; * You must n’t play the prude,’ 
he said.” 

Odd clenched his teeth. 

Hilda, dear,” he said, in a voice cold to severity, 
you must go home ; I will put you in a cab. I 
will come to you as soon as I have punished that 
dog.” 

“ Peter, don’t ! I beg of you to come with me. 
You can do nothing. I must bury it, forget it.” 
She had risen as he rose. 

Yes, bury it, forget it, Hilda. He, at least, shall 
never forget it.” 

Odd’s fixed look as he led her into the street 
forced her to helpless silence. 

“ Peter, please ! ” she breathed, clasping her 
hands together and gazing at him as he hailed a 
fiacre. 

“ I will come to you soon. Good-bye.” 

229 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


And so Hilda was driven away. 

It was past six when Odd reached the Rue 
Pierre Charron. Rosalie opened the door. Madame 
was in bed, she had had a bad day. Mademoiselle ? 
she is lying down. She seemed ill. “A/ bien 
malade and had said that she wanted no 

dinner. 

“ I should like to see her, if only for a moment ; 
she will see me, I think,” said Odd, walking into 
the drawing-room. Hilda entered almost imme- 
diately. 

She had been crying, and the disorder of her 
hair suggested that she had cried with her head 
buried in a pillow, after the stifled feminine fashion. 
Her face was most pathetically disfigured by tears ; 
the disfigurement almost charming of youth and 
loveliness ; but she looked ill, too. The white cheek 
and the heavy eyelids, the unsteady sweetness of 
her lips showed that an extreme of physical exhaus- 
tion, as well as the tempest of grief, had swept her 
beyond all thought of self-control, beyond all wish 
for it. The afternoon’s unpleasantness had been 
merely the last straw. The long endurance of the 
past month — the past months indeed — that had 
asked no pity, had been hardly conscious of a claim 
on pity — was transformed by her knowledge of near 
love and sympathy to a quivering sensibility. There 
was no reticence in her glance. He was the one 
she turned to, the one she trusted, the only one 
who understood and loved her in the whole world. 
Odd saw all this as the supreme confidence of a 
supremely reserved nature looked at him from her 
eyes. 


230 


HILDA 


He met her, stooping his head to hers, and, like 
a child, she put up her face to be kissed. When he 
had kissed her, he drew back. A sudden horrible 
weakness almost overcame him. 

“ Sit down, dear ; no, I will walk about a bit. I 
have been playing the fiery jeune premier to such 
an extent this afternoon that dramatic restlessness 
is in keeping.” 

Hilda smiled faintly, and her eyes followed him 
as he took a few turns up and down the room. 

“ You look so badly,” he said, pausing before her ; 
“ how do you feel ? ” 

“ Not myself ; or, perhaps, too much myself.” 
Hilda tried to smile, stretching out her arms with 
a long shaken sigh. “ I feel weak and foolish,” she 
added, clasping her hands on her knee. 

“ It is all right, you know. He apologized pro- 
fusely.” 

How did you make him do that ? ” 

“ I told him the truth, including the fact of his 
own despicableness.” 

“ And he believed it ? ” 

I helped him to the belief by a pretty thorough 
thrashing.” 

‘‘ Oh ! ” cried Hilda. 

“He deserved it, dear.” 

“ But — I had exposed myself to it ; he thought 
himself justified.” 

“ I had to disabuse him of that thought. He 
bawled out something like a challenge under the 
salutary lesson, but when I promptly seconded the 
suggestion — insisted on the extreme satisfaction it 
would give me to have a shot at him — the bourgeois 
231 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


strain came out. He fairly whined. I was dis- 
appointed. I had bloodthirsty desires.’' 

Oh, I am very glad he whined then ! Don’t 
speak of such horrors. You know I am hysterical.” 

Odd still stood before her, and Hilda put out her 
hand. 

How can I thank you ? ” He put her hand to his 
lips, not looking at her but down at the heavy folds 
of her white dress ; it had a shroud-like look that 
gave him a shudder. Hilda’s life seemed shroud- 
like, shutting her out from all brightness, from all 
love — love hers by right, and only hers. 

“You know, you know that I would do anything 
for you,” he said. 

The hand he kissed drew him down beside her, 
hardly consciously, and he yielded to the longing 
he felt in her for comforting kindness and nearness ; 
yielded, too, to his own growing weakness ; but 
he still held the hand to his lips, not daring to look 
at her. This childlike trust, this dependence, were 
dreadful. The long kiss seemed to his troubled 
soul a momentary shield. He found her eyes on 
him when he raised his own. 

“ I never thought it would come true — in this 
way,” she said. 

“ What come true ? ” 

“ That you would really care for me,” 

Her pure look seemed to flutter to him, to fold 
peaceful wings on his breast ; its very contentment 
constituted a caress. The child was still a child, 
and yet in the look there were worlds of ignorant 
revelation. A shock of possibilities made Odd 
dizzy, and the certain strain of weakness in him 
232 


HILDA 

made it impossible for him to warn and protect her 
ignorance. 

He was conscious of a quick grasp at the tran- 
scendental friendship of which alone she was aware. 

My little friend, I care for you dearly, dearly.” 
But with the words, his hold on the transcendental 
friendship slipped, fundamental truths surged up ; 
he took both her hands, and clasping them on his 
breast, said, hardly conscious of his words — 

Sweetest, noblest — dearest,” with an emotion 
only too contagious, for Hilda’s eyes filled with 
tears. The sight of these tears, her weakness, the 
horrible unfairness of her position, appealed, even 
at this moment, to all his manliness. He controlled 
himself from taking her into his arms, and his grasp 
on her hands held her from him. 

“ I understand, Hilda, I understand it all — all 
you have suffered ; the loneliness, the injustice, the 
dreary drudgery. I know, dear, I know that you 
have been unhappy.” 

Oh yes ! I have been unhappy ! so unhappy ! ” 
The tears rolled down her cheeks while she spoke, 
fell on Odd’s hands clasping hers. No one ever 
cared for me, no one. Papa, mamma, Katherine 
even, not really ; is n’t it cruel, cruel ? ” This self- 
pity, so uncharacteristic, showing as it did the 
revulsion in her whole nature, filled Odd with a 
sort of helpless terror. “ That is what I wanted ; 
some one to care ; I thought it must be my fault.” 
The words came in sighing breaths, incoherent : 
“ I have been so lonely.” 

My child ! My poor, poor child ! ” 

** Let me tell you everything. I must tell you 

233 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


now since you care for me. I have been so fond of 
you — always. You remember when I was a child ? ” 
Odd held her hands tightly and mechanically. 
Poor little hands ; they gave him the feeling of light 
spars clung to in a whirling shipwreck. “ Even then 
I was lonely, I see that now ; and even then it 
weighed upon me, that thought that I was not to the 
people I loved what they were to me. I felt no in- 
justice. I must be unworthy. It seems to me that 
all my life I have struggled to make people love me, 
to make them take me near to them. But you ! 
You were near at once. Do I explain? It sounds 
morbid, doesn’t it? But it isn’t, for my loneliness 
was almost unconscious, and I merely felt that with 
you I was happy, that things were clear, that you 
understood everything. You did, didn’t you ? 
Only I don’t think you ever quite understood my 
gratitude, my utter devotion to you.” Hilda’s 
tears had ceased as she went on speaking, and 
she smiled now at Odd, a quivering smile. 

“ And then you went away, and I never saw you 
again. Ah ! I can’t tell you what I suffered.” 

Odd bent his head upon the hands clasped in his. 

‘‘But how could you have known? ’’said Hilda 
tenderly ; “ I was really very silly and very unrea- 
sonable. I thought you would come back because I 
needed you. I needed the sunshine. Perhaps you 
were right about the shadow. But for years I 
waited for you. I felt sure you knew I was waiting. 
You said you would come back you know ; I never 
forgot that.” She paused a moment : “ It all ended 
in Florence,” she went on sadly ; “ such a bleak, 
bitter day, just the day for burying an illusion. I 

234 


HILDA 


see the cold emptiness of the big room now ; oh ! 
the melancholy of it ! where I was sitting alone. 
All came upon me suddenly, the reality. You know 
those crumbling shocks of reality. I realized that 
I had waited for something that could never come ; 
that you had never really understood, and that it 
would have been impossible for you to understand. 
I was a pretty, touching little incident to you, and 
you were everything to me. I realized, too, how 
silly it would all seem to any one ; how it would be 
misinterpreted and smiled at as a case of puppy-love 
perhaps. A sort of cold shame crept through me, 
and I felt really alone then. Do you know what 
that feeling is?” Her hand under his forehead 
lifted his head a little as though to question his face, 
but putting both her hands over his eyes he would 
not look at her. 

“You are so sorry?” Odd nodded. “But you 
have had that feeling? Imprisoned in oneself; 
looking, longing for a voice, a smile, — and silence, 
always, always silence. A thing quite apart from 
the surface intercourse of everyday life, not touched 
by it. You have so many friends, so many windows 
in your prison, you can’t know.” 

“ I know.” 

“ Really ? ” 

“ Yes, yes.” 

“ And you call out for help and no one hears. 
Oh, I can’t explain properly ; do you understand ?” 

“ I understand, dear.” 

“ Well, after that day in Florence, the last cranny 
of my prison seemed walled up. And — oh, then our 
troubles came, worse and worse. Responsibilities 

235 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


braced me up — far healthier, of course. And your 
books ! Their strength ; their philosophy — don’t 
tell me I might find it all in Marcus Aurelius ; your 
way of saying it went more deeply in me. Just to 
do one’s duty ; to love people and be sorry for them, 
and not snivel over oneself. Ah ! if you knew all 
your books had been to me ! Would you like it, I 
wonder ? ” Again the tenderness, almost playful, 
in her voice. Odd raised his head and looked at 
her. 

“ And when I came at last, what did you think ? ” 

The loving candor of her eyes dwelt on him. 

“ When you came ? ” she repeated. “ Then I saw 
at once that you were Katherine’s friend, and that 
your books were the nearest I should ever get to 
you.” Hilda’s voice hesitated a little ; a doubt of 
the exactitude of her perceptions from this point 
showed itself in a certain perplexity of tone. “ And 
— I don’t quite understand myself, for I did n’t plan 
anything — but just because I felt so much I was 
afraid that you would imagine I made claims on 
you. I was resolved that you should see that I had 
reached your standpoint — that I had forgotten — 
that the present had no connection with the past.” 

“ But I had not forgotten,” Odd groaned. 

“No?” Hilda smiled rather lightly; “it would 
have been very strange if you had n’t. Besides, as I 
say, I saw at once that you were Katherine’s, and 
that it was right and natural. Your books taught 
me, too, the true peace of renunciation, you see ! 
Not that this called for renunciation exactly,” and 
again Hilda paused with the faint look of perplexity. 
“ There was nothing to renounce since you were 
236 


HILDA 


hers, except I must have felt a certain disappoint- 
ment. I felt a little frozen. Such dull egotism ! ” 
She turned her eyes away, looking vaguely out into 
the dusky room. But even on that first day I 
meant that you should see, and that she should see, 
that I knew that the past made no bond : in my 
heart it might, not in yours, I knew, for all your 
kindness.” 

“ Go on, Hilda,” said Odd, as she paused. 

“ Well, you know all the rest. When you were 
engaged and she more than friend, I had hoped for 
it, and I saw that my turn might come ; that I 
might step into Kathy’s vacated shoes, so to speak ; 
that we might be friends, and all my dreams be ful- 
filled after all. I began then to let myself know 
that I did care, for I had tried to help myself before 
by pretending that I did n’t. I would n’t do any- 
thing to make you like me. If you were to like me, 
you would of yourself ; all the joy of having you 
care for me would be in having made no effort. 
And the dream did come true. I saw more and 
more that you cared. To-day I feel it, like sun- 
shine.” Odd still stared at her, and again through 
sudden tears she smiled at him. “ Only — is n’t it 
strange ? — things are always so ; it must be, too, 
that I am weak, overwrought, for I feel so sad, as 
though I were at the bottom of the sea, and looking 
up through it at the sun.” 

“ Great heavens ! ” muttered Odd. He looked at 
her for a silent moment, then suddenly putting his 
arm around her neck, he drew her to him. 

He did not kiss her, but he said, leaning his head 
against hers — 


237 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“ And I — so unworthy ! ” 

“ No, no,” said Hilda, and with a little sigh, “ not 
unworthy, dear Peter.” 

“ I, dully stumbling about your exquisite soul,” 
Peter went on, pressing her head more closely to 
his. “Ah, Hilda! Hilda!” 

“ What, dear friend ? ” 

“ I cannot tell you.” 

“ Unkind ; I tell you everything.” 

“You can tell me everything. You can tell me 
how much you have cared for me, how much you 
care. I cannot tell you how much I care. I cannot 
tell you how infinitely dear you are to me.” He 
had spoken, her face hidden from him in its near- 
ness ; now, turning his head he kissed her hair, and 
frowning, he looked at her and kissed her on the lips. 
Hilda drew back and rose to her feet. A subtle 
change, perplexity deepened, crossed her face, but, 
standing before him, she looked down at him and he 
saw that her trust rose as to a test. She put her 
hands out as though from an impulse to lay them 
on his shoulders ; then, as an instinct within the im- 
pulse seemed to warn her, though leaving her clear 
look untouched, she clasped them together and said 
gravely — 

“ You may tell me. You are infinitely dear to me^ 

Odd still frowned. Her terrible innocence gave 
him a sense of helpless baseness. 

“I may tell you how much I love you?” and he 
too rose and stood before her. 

“ I have always loved you,” said Hilda, with her 
grave look. “ I love you now as much as I did 
when I was a child.” 


238 


HILDA 


The impossible height where she placed him be- 
side her made Odd’s head swim. He felt himself 
caught up for a moment into the purity of her eyes, 
and looking into them he came close to her. 

“ My angel ! My angel ! ” he hardly breathed. 

“ Dear Peter,” and the tears came into the pure 
eyes. And, at the sight, the heaven brimmed with 
loveliest human weakness, the love unconscious but 
all revealed. Odd was conscious only of a dizzy 
descent from impossibility, the crash of the inevi- 
table. 

One step and he had taken her into his arms, 
seeing as he did so, in a flash, the white wonder of 
her face ; he could almost have smiled at it — divinely 
dull creature ! Holding her closely, the white folds 
of the shroud-like dress crushed against his breast, 
his cheek upon her hair, he could not kiss her and 
he could not speak, and in a silence as unmistak- 
able as word or kiss, his long embrace forgot the 
past and defied the future. 

The painful image of a bird he had once seen, 
wings broken, dying of a shot and feebly fluttering, 
came to him as he felt her stir ; her hands pushing 
him away. 

** Dearest — dearest — dearest.” 

Her effort faltered to resistless helplessness. 

Stooping his head he looked at her face ; it wore 
an almost tranquil, a corpse-like look. Her eyes 
were closed and the eyebrows drawn up a little in 
a faint, fixed frown ; but the childlike line of her 
mouth had all the sad passivity of death. Odd 
tremblingly kissed the gentle sternness of the lips. 

She loved him, but how cruel he was. 

239 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


*‘0h, my precious,” he said, “look at me. For- 
give me ; I love you.” 

He had freed her hands, and she raised them and 
bent her face upon them. 

“ You don’t hate me for telling you the truth ? ” 
And as she made no sign : “ No, no, you don’t hate 
me ; you love me and I love you. I have loved you 
from the beginning. Oh, my child, my child, why 
did you let me think you did not care ? Look at 
me, dearest.” 

“ What have I done ? ” said Hilda. She still kept 
her face hidden in her hands. 

“You have done nothing; it is I, I who have 
done it ! ” 

“ I never could have believed it of you,” she said, 
and he felt it to be the simple statement of a fact. 

“ O Hilda — I have only told you the truth, that 
is my crime.” 

“You told me because of what I said ? You love 
me because of what I said ? ” 

“ Good God ! I have been madly in love with 
you for months! ” 

“ For months ? ” she repeated dully. 
i “ For years, perhaps, who knows ! ” 

“ I did not know that I — that you — ” 

“You knew nothing, my poor angel.” 

He enfolded her again. Her look seemed to 
stumble and grope for an entreaty ; her very power- 
lessness in the grasp of her realized love enchanted 
him. 

“ How base ! how base 1 ” she moaned. 

“Am I a cruel brute? Ah! Hilda, you love me, 
and I cannot help myself.” 

240 


HILDA 


“ No — you cannot help yourself. I love you and 
I told you so.” 

‘‘You did not mean this.'' 

“ I did not mean it. Oh, I trusted you. I did 
not doubt myself. I am wicked.” The strange re- 
vulsion from her long selflessness had reached its 
height in poor Hilda ; but, in her eyes, the discov- 
ered self was indeed wicked, a terrible revelation. 
Her head fell helplessly against his shoulder. 

“ O Peter, Peter ! ” 

“ What, my darling child ? ” 

“ That we should be so base ! ” 

“ Not wCy Hilda. 'Not jyou / " 

“Yes, I — for I am happy — think of it, happy! 
Peter, I love you so much.” She wept, her head 
upon his shoulder. “ Keep me for a moment, only 
a moment longer. As I am wicked, let me have the 
good of it. I am glad that you love me. No ; 
don’t kiss me. Tell me again that you have loved 
me for a long time.” 

“ From the moment I saw you again, I think. I 
knew it when I began meeting you after your les- 
sons. Do you remember that first day in the rain ? 
I do ; and your little hat with the bow on it, the 
hole in your little glove, your white little face. I 
went away to the South because I could not trust 
myself with you. I did not dream that you loved 
me, but I felt— ah ! I felt— that I could have made 
you love me ! ” 

“ And yet — you loved Katherine ! ” 

The anguish of the broken words pierced him. 

“ Hilda, you cannot find me baser than I find 
myself. I did not love her.” 
l6 241 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


** Peter ! Peter ! ” 

Believe me, my precious child, when I tell you 
that you are the only one — my only love ! ” 

0 Peter ! ” 

1 never thought that I loved Katherine, but I 
had no fear of injustice to her, for I never thought 
that love would come into my life ; and, hardly was 
the cruel stupidity consummated, when the truth 
crept upon me. Friendly comradeship on the one 
hand, and on the other — O Hilda ! — a passion that 
has transformed my life. The truth fell upon you 
like a thunderbolt ; my love for you crashed in upon 
your heavenly dreaming ; but you see — be brave 
enough to acknowledge what it all means, your 
dream and my love that needed no thunderbolt to 
wake it, — be brave enough to own that it is inevi- 
table, that from the time that you put your hand in 
mine ten years ago, dated that rarest, that divinest 
thing, a love, a sympathy infinite. Dear child, be 
brave enough to own that before it, mistakes may 
be put aside without dishonor.” 

“ Peter, Peter, let me go. Without dishonor ! 
We are both already dishonorable, and oh ! it is that 
that breaks my heart ; that you, that you who 
should have helped me, protected me from the folly 
of my ignorance, that you should be dishonorable ! ” 
O Hilda ! ” 

'‘Yes,” she said wildly, "yes, yes, Peter; and I 
am wicked — wicked, for I love you. Yes — kiss me ; 
there, now I am thoroughly wicked. Now let me 

go-” 

Odd, white and shaken, still locked his arms 
about her. 

242 


HILDA 


** I was base if you will, too base for your loveli- 
ness ; but you, my darling, have not a shadow on 
you ; you were impossibly noble. Remember, that 
if there is dishonor, I am dishonored, not you ; 
remember that / have done this ! ” 

As he spoke, holding Hilda in his arms, the door 
opened and Katherine entered. 

243 


CHAPTER XI 


K atherine dosed the door swiftly behind 
her and looked at them, not with a horror of 
surprise for the betrayal, but a strange, stiffened 
look. She had on her travelling hat and coat, a 
wrap on her arm, and the thumping of her boxes 
was heard outside on the stairs. 

Katherine had schemed and success was hers, 
but this unlooked-for achievement struck her like 
a dagger and made triumph bitter. 

Fate had played for her; Fate and not she was 
the heroine. Katherine felt herself struck down 
from her masterly eminence, saw herself reduced to 
a miserable position, a tool with the other tools — 
Peter and Hilda. 

To see Hilda thus was an undreamed-of shatter- 
ing of ideals and pierced even her own humiliation, 
for Katherine almost unconsciously had looked up 
to Hilda. She was to use her, play her game with 
her, but for Hilda’s own advantage ; she, not Fate, 
was to put her in Peter’s arms, unspotted and in- 
nocent of the combinations that had led her there. 
All Katherine’s plans in England had prospered 
and, in Paris, a nobly frank part awaited her. 
Avowal to Peter of incompatibility, her generous 
perception of his love for Hilda — a brave, manlike 
part — to which she had looked forward as to an 
244 


HILDA 


atonement for the ulterior motives. And Katherine 
had almost persuaded herself that there would be 
little acting needed. Had she not seen, guessed, 
the truth ? Had the truth not pained her, humili- 
ated her? Had she not risen finely above her pain 
and wished them happiness? In moments of self- 
scorn, the ulterior motives, her own cautious look 
before leaping, had filled her with impatient scorch- 
ings, and Katherine could scorch herself as well 
as others in the pitiless flame of clear-sighted an- 
alysis. But was her own rebellion from the irksome 
standards of a higher nature — a rebellion that had 
carried her into such opposition as to fall below her- 
self to a hard matter-of-fact ambition, touched with 
a sense of revenge upon her own disappointment, 
— was that rebellion, that ambition, so base, so 
pitiful ? 

Perhaps even the clearest analysis becomes so- 
phistical if carried too far, and Katherine found ex- 
cuses that explained for herself. But now all was 
base, all pitiful, and she, in contrast with Hilda’s 
fall, had risen. On this lowered platform, the ad- 
vantage was hers, terribly hers, and it was good, 
good to lose self-scorn in her scorn for them. 

She laid down her wrap on a table and began to 
slowly draw off her gloves. 

My return was inopportune.” The icy steadi- 
ness of her voice pleased her own sense of fitness. 

Or opportune?” She directed her eyes upon 
Odd, and indeed his attitude assumed all the igno- 
bility of the situation. He welcomed responsibility ; 
to heap shame upon his own head was all he prayed 
for. With a kind of desperate sincerity he kept his 
245 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


arm around Hilda, and almost defiantly he had 
placed himself before her; he felt that Hilda’s look 
of frozen horror gave him the advantage. 

“ Opportune, Katherine,” he said ; “ now at least 
I shall not have to lie to you. You can see the 
whole extent of my baseness.” 

Such sudden baseness too. How long have we 
been engaged ? ” 

It was good to turn on him those daggers of her 
own humiliation ; to feel his disloyalty justify hers, 
nay, more than justify, give absolution, for she had 
not been disloyal, thinking he loved her. 

Katherine,” said Odd, “ I can only beg you to 
believe that I have struggled — for your sake, for her 
sake. Until this evening I thought that neither of 
you would ever know the truth.” 

This bracketing of Hilda’s injury with hers stank 
in Katherine’s nostrils. She controlled a quivering 
rage that ran through her, and, speaking a little 
more slowly for the tension she put upon herself — 

“ I can imagine no greater humiliation than the 
one you were so chivalrously preparing for me,” 
she said. “ Marriage with an unloving man ! I 
can imagine nothing more insulting. I deserved 
the truth from you, and how dared you think of 
degrading me by withholding it ? ” The white in- 
dignation of her own words almost impressed Kath- 
erine with their sincerity. She had seen the truth, 
and Peter’s futile efforts to withhold it from her had 
filled her with an almost kindly scorn for his stupid- 
ity. But in the light of his present relapse from 
fidelity, the retrospect grew lurid. 

Katherine,” said Odd gloomily, “ I would not so 
246 


HILDA 


have insulted you after this. As long as I kept my 
secret there would have been no insult.” 

“ I think I should have preferred the jilting before. 
You might have waited, Peter.” 

Until now Katherine had steadily kept her eyes 
on Odd, and there had been growing in her a certain 
sense of loss, most illogical, most painful. Hilda had 
won, and she had never gained. Katherine hardly 
knew for jealousy the sudden desire for vengeance 
as she turned her eyes upon her sister. 

“ So at last your long fidelity has been rewarded, 
Hilda,” she said. 

Hilda’s wild wide gaze, her parted lips of mute 
agony, gave her the stricken look of a miserable ani- 
mal with the fangs of a pack of hounds at its throat. 
Odd sickened at the sight ; it maddened him too, 
and long resentments, long kept under, sprang up 
fierce and indifferent to cruelty. 

“ Katherine, say anything — anything you will to 
me,” and Odd’s voice broke a little as he spoke, 
“ but not one word to her ! Not one word ! It 
comes badly from you, Katherine, badly ; for you 
have played the vampire with the rest of them ! 
This child has given you all her very life.” He 
held Hilda to him as he spoke ; his look, his gesture 
those of a man driven to fury by the hint of an 
attack on his best beloved ; and Katherine, her head 
bent, looked at them both from under her straight 
eyebrows, breathing quickly. 

Her life has been one long self-immolation. It 
was too much for me this evening. I realized what 
she had never told me, the past years and this 
past month of drudgery and loneliness and insult ! 
247 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


She nursed your mother ; she did the work of the 
servants you and your father took with you ; she 
earned the money for the bare necessaries of life — 
you and your father having the luxuries ; she bore 
insult, as I said. And once, and once only, I sav/ 
her crushed, and like the brute I am, like the das- 
tard I am, I too joined the ranks of the egotists, I 
too heaped misery upon her ; I told her I loved her, 
and I took her into my arms as you saw us.” 

“ Yes ; as I see you.” Katherine’s very lips were 
white. 

Hilda gave a sudden start and almost roughly 
she thrust Odd away ; the terror on her face had 
hardened to that look of resolution ; Odd remem- 
bered it. From the very extremity of anguish she 
passed to the extremity of self-control. 

“ Katherine,” she said, “he is trying to shield me. 
It did not happen like that. I told him that I loved 
him. I told him that I had always loved him.” 

“ Oh ! did you ? ” said Katherine, with a withered 
little laugh. 

“ My child ! ” cried poor Odd, a horrid sense of 
helplessness before this assumption of incredible 
humiliation half paralyzing him — “ my child, what 
are you saying ? What madness ! ” 

“ I am not mad, I am saying the truth. I told 
you that I loved you.” 

“ In reply to an avowal of love on my part, a love 
you misunderstood. You know, as I knew when 
you spoke, that the affection you owned so finely, 
so nobly, so purely, was the child’s love, the love of 
the loyal sister for her friend, the love of an angel.” 

“ I am not sure,” said Hilda. 

248 


HILDA 


“ Oh ! ” cried Odd, looking at her with savage 
tenderness, “ this is unbearable.” 

It wasasif they had forgotten, each in the mutual 
justification of the other, Katherine standing there 
a silent spectator. 

But Odd was conscious of that outraging contem- 
plation. 

Hilda,” he said appealingly and yet sternly, “at 
the very height of your trust in me I betrayed it. 
Your nobility had reached its climax. I had kissed 
you and you retreated, but without a shadow of 
doubt ; and I, from the base wish to try your trust 
to the utmost, said that I loved you. You never 
faltered from your innocent outlook in replying ; it 
was I who saw the truth, not you.” 

“ Katherine,” Hilda repeated, “ he is trying to 
shield me. We are both base, yes ; but I forced 
him to baseness. I longed for him to love me, and 
when he took me in his arms, I was glad.” 

“ Good God ! ” cried Peter. 

Katherine averted her eyes from her sister’s face. 

“I must own, Peter,” she said, “ that your posi- 
tion was difficult. Hilda evidently painted the 
pathos of her life to you in most touching colors 
— she herself very white on the background of 
our black depravity. That in itself is enough to 
shake a rather emotional heart like yours. And 
then, Hilda being very beautiful, and you not a 
Galahad I fear, she confesses her love for you, 
retreating delicately before your kisses. Of course 
those kisses she received as platonic pledges — from 
the man engaged to her sister. Trying for the man, 
very ; I quite recognize it. Under such tempting 
249 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


circumstances the struggle for loyalty and honor 
must have been difficult. As you could hardly solve 
the difficulty, she solved it for you, very effectually, 
very courageously. When you took her in your 
arms — how often we repeat that phrase — the ‘ truth ’ 
at last flashed upon you. Even devoted friendship 
could hardly account for such yielding unconven- 
tionality, and Hilda’s hidden love won the day.” 

During these remarks, Odd felt himself shaking 
with rage. If Katherine had been a man he would 
have knocked her down ; as it was, his voice was 
the equivalent of a blow as he said, clenching his 
hand on the back of a chair — 

You despicable creature ! ” 

He and Katherine glared at one another. 

“ Only the higher nature can put itself so hid- 
eously in the power of the lower,” Odd went on ; 
“ and you dare ! ” 

“No, no; all she says may be true!” moaned 
Hilda. She dropped upon the sofa and hid her 
face in her hands, adding brokenly : “ And how 
can you be so cruel ? so cruel to her ? She loves 
you too ! ” 

Katherine turned savagely upon her sister, and 
then, impulse nipped by quick reflection — 

“You need not allow for a woman’s jealousy, 
Mr. Odd. Don’t, no indeed you must not, flatter 
yourself with my broken heart. I don’t like hu- 
miliation for myself or for others. I don’t like to 
scorn my sister whom I trusted, whom I loved. I 
could have killed the person who had told me this 
of her ! My humiliation, my scorn, make me too 
bitter for charity. But I give you back your word 
250 


HILDA 

without one regret for myself. You have killed my 
love very effectually.” 

“ Was there ever much to kill, Katherine ? ” 

That is ignoble, quite as ignoble as I could pre- 
dict of you. Hilda’s lesson must necessarily make 
the past look pale.” 

“ I can only hope that you do yourself an in- 
justice by such base speeches, Katherine.” 

Your example has been contagious.” 

‘^Let me think so by proving yourself more 
worthy than you seem. Ask your sister’s forgive- 
ness — as I ask yours — humbly. She has not feared 
humiliation.” 

I do not find myself in a position to fear or 
accept it. I found Hilda in the dust, and I cannot 
forgive her for having fallen there. Her poor con- 
fession was no atonement. And now, Mr. Odd, I 
make an exit more apropos than my entrance, and 
leave you with her.” Katherine took up her wrap 
and walked out without looking again at Hilda. 

“And /have done this,” said Odd. Hilda lay 
motionless, her face upon her arms, and he ap- 
proached her. There was a strange effect of no 
Hilda at all under the heavy folds of the gown ; in 
the dark it glimmered with a vacant whiteness ; it 
was as though the cruel words had beaten away her 
body and her soul. 

“ Hilda ! ” said Odd, broken-heartedly, hesitating 
as he paused beside her, not daring to touch the 
still figure. “ Hilda ! ” he repeated ; “if only you 
will forgive me ; if only 570U will own that it is I, 
I only who need forgiveness, and unsay those mad 
words that gave her the power ! Oh ! that she 
251 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


should have had the power ! She has made re- 
morse impossible ! ” Odd added, addressing himself 
rather than Hilda, whose silence offered no hint of 
sympathy. 

“ Why did you put yourself under her feet and 
make me powerless ? ” he asked ; “ you know that 
your gentle reticence had for months kept my love 
in check ; you knew that had I kept at your level, 
you would have never realized that you loved me.” 
He bent above her and kissed her hand. “ Precious 
one ! Dearest, dearest child.” 

“ Oh, don’t ! ” said Hilda. She drew her hand 
away, not lifting her head. “ Her heart is broken. 
I am all that she said.” 

“ Her heart is not broken ! ” cried Odd, in rather 
desperate accents. I could swear to it ! She is a 
cruel, heartless girl ! ” 

What would you have asked of her? You were 
cruel to her.” 

** I am glad of it.” And as Hilda made no reply 
to this statement, he stooped to her again, imploring : 
“ Will you not look at me ? Look up, dearest ; tell 
me again that you love me.” 

“ I am already in the dust,” said Hilda, after a 
pause. 

^‘You shall not sink to a morbid acceptance of 
that venom ! ” cried Odd ; he took her by the 
shoulders with almost a suggestion of shaking her. 
“Sit up. Listen to me,” he said, raising her and 
looking down at her stricken face, his hands on her 
shoulders. “ I have loved you passionately for 
months. She was right in one thing ; I had better 
have told her, not have fumbled with that fatally 
252 


HILDA 


misplaced idea of honor. You may have loved me, 
but I was as unconscious of it as you were. To-day 
you were worn out, terrified, miserable. Just see it 
with one grain of common charity, of common 
sense, psychology, physiology if you will, for you 
are ill, wretchedly weak and off balance, my darling 
child ! ” Odd added, sitting down beside her ; and 
he would have drawn her to him, but Hilda 
repeated — 

Don’t.” 

You felt my pity, my sympathy,” Odd went on, 
holding her hands. ‘‘You felt my love, poor little 
one, unconsciously. You turned to me like the 
child you were and are. You were starving for 
kindness, consolation — for love — you came to your 
friend, the friend you trusted, and you found more 
than a friend. The love you owned so beautifully 
was a truth too high for the hearer.” 

“ Oh ! I did not dream that you loved me. I did 
not dream that I loved you. ! ” Hilda wailed suddenly. 

“ Thank God that you own to that ! ” Odd 
ejaculated. 

“ That does not clear me,” she retorted. “ No, 
no ; I was a fool. You, the man engaged to my 
sister ! I should have felt the danger, the dis- 
loyalty of your interest. I was a fool not to feel 
it ! And that appeal I made to you— it was no 
more or less that sickening self-pity, that das- 
tardly whine over my own pathos, that morbid 
sentimentality ! I see it all, all ! I was trying to 
make you care for me, love me. I suppose crimes 
are usually committed by people off balance physi- 
cally, but crimes are crimes, and I am wicked. I 

253 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


hate myself ! ” she sobbed, bending again her face 
upon her hands. 

“ Hilda,” said Odd, trying to speak calmly and 
reasonably, you could not have tried to make me 
fond of you, since I had plainly proved to you for 
months that I adored you. You complain ! You 
gain pity ! When your cold little air of imperson- 
ality blinded even my eyes ; when only my love for 
you gave me the instinctive uneasiness that led me, 
step by step — you retreating before me — to the final 
realizations ; and final they are not, I could swear 
to it ! Ah ! some day, Hilda, some day I shall get 
at the real truth. I shall worm it from you. You 
shall be forced to tell me all that you have suffered.” 
Hilda interrupted him with an “ Oh ! ” from be- 
tween clenched teeth. 

“ Katherine was right,” she said, “ I have painted 
myself in pathetic colors. What a prig! What an 
egotist ! ” Her voice trembled on its low note of 
passionate self-scorn. 

“ An egotist I ” Odd burst into a loud laugh. 
That caps the climax. Come, Hilda,” he added, 
don’t be too utterly ridiculous. Facts are, happily, 
still facts ; your toiling youth and utter sacrifice 
among them. As I say, I have n’t yet sounded the 
depths of your self-renunciation, and, as I say, some 
day you will tell me, my Hilda ; my brave, splendid, 
unconscious little child.” Odd put his arms around 
her as he spoke, but Hilda’s swift uprising from them 
had a lightning-like decision. 

“You dare speak so tome! After this! After 
our baseness! You dare to speak of some day? 
There will never be any day for us — together.” 

254 


HILDA 


** I say there will be, Hilda.” 

“You think that I could ever forget my sister’s 
misery ; my shame and yours ? ” 

“You are raving, my poor child. I think that 
common sense will win the day.” 

“ That is a placid term for such degradation.” 

“ I see no degradation in a love that can rise above 
a hideous mistake.” 

“You will find that hideous mistakes are things 
that cling. You can’t mend a broken heart by 
marching over it.” 

“ One may avoid breaking another.” 

“ You make me scorn you. I am ashamed of lov- 
ing you. Yes; there is the bitterest shame of all. 
I love you and I despise you. You are nothing 
that I thought you. You are weak, and cruel, and 
mean.” 

“ You, Hilda, are only cruel — unutterably cruel,” 
said Odd brokenly. 

“ I never wish to see you again.” Hilda stared 
with dilated eyes into his eyes of pitiful appeal. 
“ You have robbed my life of the little it had ; you 
have robbed me of self-respect.” 

“ Shall I leave you, Hilda ? ” 

“ You have broken her heart, and you have broken 
mine. Yes, leave me.” 

“ Good-bye,” said Odd. He walked towards the 
door like a man stabbed to the heart, and half- 
unconscious. 

“ Peter ! ” cried Hilda, in a hard voice. He turned 
towards her. She was standing in the middle of the 
room looking at him with the same fixed and dilated 
eyes. 


255 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 

“ What is it, my child ? ” Odd asked gently. 

“ Kiss me good-bye ! ” 

He came to her, and she held out her arms. 
They clasped one another. 

“ Must I leave you ? ” he asked, in a stammering 
voice. 

“ Yes, yes, yes. Kiss me.” 

He bent his head and their lips met. Hilda un- 
clasped her arms and moved away from him, and he 
made no attempt to keep her. Looking at her with 
a characteristic mingling of suffering and rather 
grimly emphatic humor, he said — 

‘‘ I will waitr 

And turning away, he walked out of the room. 
256 


CHAPTER XII 


F or two whole weeks — strange cataclysm in the 
Archinard household — Hilda stayed in bed 
really ill. Taylor waited on her with an indignant 
devotion that implied, by contrast, worlds of re- 
pressed antagonism ; for Taylor had highly disap- 
proved of her trip with Katherine, and when she 
announced to Hilda on the day after the great catas- 
trophe that Katherine had returned to England, she 
added with emphasis — 

‘‘ But I don’t go this time, Miss Hilda. It 's your 
turn to have a maid now.” 

The news took a weight of dread from Hilda’s 
heart. She shrank from again seeing her own guilt 
looking at her from Katherine’s tragic eyes. She 
did not need Katherine to impress it ; during long 
days and dim, half delirious nights it haunted her, 
the awful sense of irremediable wrong, of everlasting 
responsibility for her sister’s misery. With all the 
capability for self-torture, only possessed by the 
most finely tempered natures, she scourged her 
memory again and again through that blighting hour 
when she had appealed for and confessed a love that 
had dishonored her. She dwelt with sickening on 
the moment when she had said : “ I love you, too ! ” 
Her conscience, fanatically unbalanced, distorted it 
with cruellest self-injustice. Indeed, such moments 
17 257 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


in life are difficult of analysis ; the unconsciously 
spoken words followed by a consciousness so swift 
that in perspective they merge. In periods of clearer 
moral visions she could place her barrier, but only 
for mere flashes of relief, turned from with agony, as 
the dreadful fact of Katherine’s ruined love surged 
over all and made of day and night one blackness. 

Hilda’s love for Odd now told her that for months 
past it had been growing from the child’s devotion, 
and, with the new torture of a hopeless longing upon 
her — for which she despised herself — she saw in the 
whole scene with him the base self-betrayal of a love- 
sick heart. 

Only a few days after Katherine’s departure, the 
Captain returned. 

Hilda felt, as he would come in and look at her 
lying there with that weird sense of distance upon 
her, that her father was changed. He walked care- 
fully in and out on the tips of the Archinard toes, 
and, outside the door, she could hear him talking 
in tones of fretful anxiety on her behalf. 

He hardly mentioned Katherine’s broken engage- 
ment, and, for once in her life, Hilda was an object 
of consideration for her family. Even Mrs. Archi- 
nard rose from her sofa on more than one occasion 
to sit plaintively beside her daughter’s bed ; and it 
was from her that Hilda learned that they were 
going back to Allersley. 

Her father, then, must have enough money to 
pay mortgages and debts, and Hilda lay with closed 
eyes while her forebodings leaped to possibilities 
and to probabilities. The Captain’s good fortune 
showed to her in a dismal light of material depcnd- 
258 


HILDA 


ence, and she could guess miserably at its source. 
She could guess who encompassed her feeble life 
with care, and who it was that shielded her from 
even a feather’s weight of gratitude — for the Captain 
made no mention of his good luck. 

“Yes, we are going back to the Priory,” Mrs. 
Archinard said, her melancholy eyes resting almost 
reproachfully upon her daughter’s wasted face. “ It 
would be pleasant were it not that fate takes care to 
compensate for any sweet by an engulfing bitter. 
Katherine to jilt Mr. Odd, and you so dangerously 
ill, Hilda. I do not wonder at it, I predicted it 
rather. You have killed yourself tout simplement ; 
I consider it a simple case of suicide. Ah, yes, in- 
deed ! The doctor thinks it very, very serious. No 
vitality, complete exhaustion. I said to him, ^ Doc^ 
teur^ elle s est tu^e' I said it frankly.” 

Mrs. Archinard found another invalid rather con- 
fusing. She had for so long contemplated one only, 
that, insensibly, she adopted the same tones of 
pathos and pity on Hilda’s behalf, hardly realizing 
their objective nature. 

By the beginning of May they were once more in 
Allersley. It was like returning to a prior state of 
existence, and Hilda, lying in a wicker chair on the 
lawn, looked at the strange familiarity of the trees, 
the meadows, the river between its sloping banks of 
smooth green turf, and felt like a ghost among the 
unchanged scenes of her childhood. 

Mrs. Archinard found out, bit by bit, that it was 
tiresome to keep her sofa now that there was an 
opposition faction on the lawn ; she realized, too, to 
a certain extent, what it was that Hilda had been 
259 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


to that sofa existence ; without the background of 
Hilda’s quiet servitude, it became flat and flavor- 
less, and Mrs. Archinard arose and actually walked, 
and for longer periods every day, drifting about the 
house and garden in pensive contemplation of ten- 
ants’ havoc. She sighed over the Priory and said 
it had changed very much, but, characteristically, 
she did not think of asking how the Priory had come 
to them again. The Captain vouchsafed no hint. 
He went rather sulkily through his day, fished a 
little — the Captain had no taste for a pleasure as in- 
expensive as fishing — and read the newspapers with 
ejaculations of disgust at political follies. 

When Hilda sat in the sunshine near the river, 
her father often walked aimlessly in her neighbor- 
hood, eyeing her with almost embarrassed glances, 
always averted hastily if her eyes met his. Hilda 
had submitted passively to all the material changes 
of her life ; she saw them only vaguely, concentrated 
on that restless inner torture. But one day, as her 
father lingered indeterminately around her, switch- 
ing his fishing-rod, looking hastily into his fishing- 
basket, and showing evident signs of perplexity and 
indecision very clumsily concealed, a sudden thought 
of her own egotistic self-absorption struck her, and 
a sudden sense of method underlying the Captain’s 
manoeuvres. 

** Papa, come and sit down by me a little while. 
I am sure the fish will be glad of a respite. Is n’t 
it a little sunny to-day for first-class fishing ? ” Hilda 
pointed to the chair near hers, and the Captain came 
up to her with shy alacrity. 

“ Even first-class fishing is a bore, I think,” he 
260 


HILDA 


observed, not taking the chair, but laying his rod 
upon it, and looking at his daughter and then at the 
river. 

“ Feeling better to-day, are n’t you ? You might 
take a stroll with me, perhaps ; but no, you ’re not 
strong enough for that, are you ? Fine day, is n’t 
it?” 

Now that the moment looked forward to, yet 
dreaded, might be coming, the Captain vaguely 
tried to avert it after the procrastinating manner of 
weak people. Hilda did not seem to have anything 
particular to say, and the absent-minded smile on 
her face reassured him as to immediate issues. 

“ How you feeling?” she asked ; ‘‘ I have been 
looking at the trees and grass for so long that I had 
almost forgotten that there are human beings in the 
world.” 

“ Oh, I ’m very well ; very well indeed.” The 
Captain was again feeling uncomfortable. An inner 
coercion seemed to be forcing him to speak just 
because speaking was not really imperative at the 
moment. A little glow of self-approbation suddenly 
prompted him to add: ‘‘You know, I know about 
it now. That is to say, I was n’t exactly to speak 
of it, if it might pain you ; but I don’t see why it 
should do that. Upon my word,” said the Captain, 
feeling warmly self-righteous now that the ice was 
broken, “it’s more likely to pain me, isn’t it? 
Rather to my discredit, you know ; though, intrin- 
sically, I was as innocent as a babe unborn. Of 
course you helped me over a tight place now and 
then, but I thought the money came to you with a 
mere turn of the hand, so to speak ; and, as for your 
261 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


teaching — wearing yourself out— well, I don’t know 
which I was angrier with first, you or myself. I 
never dreamed of it, it never entered into my head. 
And then, my daughter and low French cads ! Well, 
he saw to that, and so did I. I saw the fellow too ; 
thought it best, you know ; for, naturally. Odd 
couldn’t have my weight and authority. I was 
simply stupefied, you know. It quite knocked me 
over when he told me. Odd told me — ” 

The Captain took up his rod, examined the reel, 
and then switched its limber length tentatively 
through the air. It was embarrassing, after all, this 
recognition of his daughter’s life. 

‘‘ Now your mother doesn’t know,” he pursued ; 
“ Odd seemed rather anxious that she should ; rather 
unfeeling of him too, I thought it. There was no 
necessity for that, was there ? It would have quite 
killed her, wouldn ’t it ? Quite.” 

“You need neither of you have known.” All 
she was wondering about, trying to grasp, made 
Hilda pale. “ It came about most naturally ; and, if 
mamma’s illness and that other unpleasant episode 
had not broken me down, my modest business 
might have come to an end — no one the wiser for it. 
Mr. Odd exaggerated the whole thing no doubt.” 

“ Well, I don’t know.” The Captain now sat down 
on the chair with a sigh of some relief. “ It ’s off 
my mind at all events. I wanted to express my 
— pain, you know, and my gratitude — and to say 
what a jolly trump I thought you ; that kind of 
thing.” 

“ Dear papa, I don’t deserve it.” 

“ Ah, well. Odd isn’t the man to make misstate- 
262 


HILDA 


Itients, you know. A bit of dreamer, unpractical, 
no doubt. But he sees facts as clearly as any one, 
you know. He showed it all clearly. Rather cut- 
ting, to tell you the truth. Of course he ’s very fond 
of you ; that’s natural. This sad affair of Kath- 
erine’s ; if it had n’t been for that, you and he would 
be brother and sister by this time.” 

It was Hilda’s turn now to draw in a little breath 
of relief. At all events her father was no ally. No 
other secret had been told, and she saw, now that 
the dread had gone, that any cause for it would 
have involved an indelicacy towards Katherine of 
which she knew Odd to be incapable. 

Where is he — Mr. Odd ? ” she asked, steeling her- 
self to the question. 

The look of gloom which touched the Captain’s 
face anew, confirmed Hilda in her certainty of infi- 
nite pecuniary obligation. 

** Not at home. Travelling again, I believe. A 
man can’t sit down quietly under a blow like that.” 

A flush came over Hilda’s face. Part of her pun- 
ishment was evident. She must hear Katherine 
spoken of as the fickle, shallow-hearted, while she, 
guilt-stained, answerable for all, went undiscovered 
and crowned with praises. Yet Katherine herself 
— any woman — would choose the part Odd had 
given her — the part of jilt rather than jilted ; and 
she, Hilda, was helpless. 

“ Papa,” she asked, driving in the dagger up to 
the hilt — she could at least punish herself, if no one 
else could punish her — “where is Katherine? Is 
she not coming to stay with us ? ” The Captain 
swung one leg over the other with impatience. 

263 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“ I Ve hardly heard from her ; she is with the 
Leonards in London. Odd spoke very highly of 
her ; seemed to think she had acted honorably ; 
but, naturally, Katherine must feel that she has 
behaved badly.” 

“ I am sure she has not done that, papa. She 
found that she would not be happy with him.” 

“ Pshaw ! That ’s all feminine folly, you know. 
She probably saw some one she liked better, some 
bigger match. Katherine is n’t the girl to throw 
over a man like Odd for a whim.” 

Hilda’s flush was now as much for her father as 
for herself. She felt her cheeks burning as she said, 
her voice trembling — 

“ Papa, papa ! How can you say such a thing of 
Katherine ! How can you ! I know it is not true. 
I know it ! ” 

“ Oh, very well, if you are in her secrets. I know 
Katherine pretty well though, and it ’s not unimag- 
inable. I don’t imply anything vulgar.” The Cap- 
tain rose as he spoke and swung his basket into 
place ; that ’s not conceivable in my daughter. 
But Katherine ’s ambitious, very ambitious. As for 
you, Hilda — and all that, you know — I am awfully 
sorry, you understand.” The Captain walked away 
briskly, satisfied at having eased his conscience. 
Odd had made it feel uncomfortably swollen and 
unwieldy, and the Captain’s conscience was, by 
nature, slim and flexible. 

Hilda lay in her chair, and looked at the river 
running brightly beyond the branches of the lime- 
tree under which she sat. The flush of misery that 
her father’s cool suppositions on Katherine’s con- 
264 


HILDA 


duct had seemed to strike into her face, only died 
slowly. She had to turn from that shame reso- 
lutely, contemplation would only deepen its help- 
lessness. She looked at the river, and thought of 
the time when she had stood beside it with Odd 
and recited Chaucer to him. She thought of the 
humorous droop of his eyelids, the kind, compre- 
hensive clasp of his hand on hers ; the look of the 
hand too, long, brown, delicate, the finger-tips too 
dainty for a man, and the dark green seal on his 
finger. Hilda turned her head away from the river 
and closed her eyes. 

‘‘ Allone, withouten any companye,” that was the 
fated motto of her life. 

265 


CHAPTER XIII 


B y the end of June, returning physical strength 
gave Hilda the wish to seek self-forgetful effort 
of some kind. She tried to busy herself with some- 
thing — with anything — and experienced the odd 
sensation of a person upon whom duty has always 
pressed and crowded, in a futile search for duty. 
The stern, sweet helper eluded her, the unreality of 
manufactured, unnecessary activity appalled her. 
She regretted the strenuous days of labor that 
meant something. Taking herself to task for a weak 
submission to circumstance, she fitted up a large 
room at the top of the house with artistic apparatus ; 
nice models were easily lured from the village ; she 
told herself that art at least remained, and tried to 
absorb herself in her painting ; but the savor of keen 
interest was gone ; the pink cheeks and staring eyes 
of her village girl were annoying. Hilda felt more 
like crying than trying to select from and modify 
her buxom charms. 

Mrs. Archinard had suddenly assumed an active 
rdle in life most confusing to her daughter. Even 
mamma did not need her. Mrs. Archinard drove 
out in the pony-cart to see people ; she held quite 
a little coterie of callers every afternoon. Mrs. 
Archinard’s little Causeries de Mardi, her society 
for little weekly dinners — only six chosen members 
266 


HILDA 

— tes Elites — stirred Allersley to the quick with 
aesthetic thrills and heart-burnings. Mrs. Archinard 
laughed prettily and lightly at her own feats, but 
Allersley was awestricken, and got down its Sainte- 
Beuve trembling, resolved on firm foundations. 

Hilda was not one of les Elites, Just for us old 
people, trying to amuse ourselves,” Mrs. Archinard 
said, and at the Causer ies Hilda was an anomalous 
and silent onlooker ; indeed the Causeries were quite 
Sainte-Beuvian in their monologic form, Mrs. Archi- 
nard causant and Allersley attentive, but discreetly 
reticent, no one caring to risk a revelation of igno- 
rance. The Captain carefully avoided both the dites 
and the mardis^ and devoted himself to more com- 
monplace individualities whose dinners were good, 
and then one wasn’t required to strain one’s temper 
by listening to fine talk. 

Mary Apswith spent a week at the Manor, and 
one fresh sunny morning she came to see Hilda. 
She found her in the garden standing between the 
rows of sweet-peas, and filling with their fragrant 
loveliness the basket on her arm. Mary’s mind 
had been given over to a commotion of conjecture 
since Peter’s flying visit to her in London. He 
had told her much and yet not enough ; though 
what he had told insured sympathy for Hilda. 
Mary was generous, and the sight of Hilda’s white 
sunlit face completed Peter’s work. She found that 
she had kissed Hilda — she, so undemonstrative — 
and standing with her arms around the girl’s slight 
shoulders, she said, looking at her with a grave 
smile, in which the slight touch of playfulness 
reminded poor Hilda of Peter — 

267 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“You will see me, won’t you ? ” 

Hilda still held in her hands the last long sprays 
she had cut — palest pink and palest purple, on 
tiptoe for a flight.” 

“ How kind of you to come,” she said. 

Kind of you to say so, since I come from 
the enemy's camp. That reckless brother of 
mine ! ” 

“Did he send you?” Hilda asked, fright in her 
eyes. 

“Send me? Oh no, he didn’t send me; but 
after what he has told me, I came naturally of my 
own free will.” Hilda smiled faintly in reply to 
Mary’s smile. 

“ What has he told you ? ” 

“ Why, simply that he had been in love with you 
almost from the day he proposed to Katherine ; 
indeed he implied an even remoter origin. Really 
Peter ought to be whipped ! He almost deserves 
the sacking you are giving him ! ” 

Hilda winced at the humorous tone. 

“ That he had made love to you most cruelly ; 
that Katherine had come in upon the love scene ; 
that she, too, was cruel — natural, though, wasn’t 
it ? Peter is rather hard on Katherine. And, to 
sum up, that you had been badly treated by the 
world in general, by himself in particular, and that 
he was very desperate and you painfully perfect, 
and — oh, a great many things.” 

“ Did he tell you that I loved him ? ” Hilda 
asked, looking down at her sweet-peas with, if that 
were possible, an added pallor. She wondered if it 
was demanded of her that she should humiliate 
268 


HILDA 

herself before Peter’s sister — tell her that she had 
made love to him. 

“ My dear child,” Mary’s voice dropped to a 
graver key, Peter trusts me, you know, and he 
ought to trust me. He told me that when he made 
love to you, you and he together found out that 
fact.” 

Even Hilda’s morbid self-doubt could not deny 
the essential truth of this point of view. 

“ And now you won’t marry him,” Mary added, 
but in a matter-of-fact manner, and as if the subject 
were folded up and put away by that conclusive 
statement. 

“ Let us walk along the path, my dear Hilda. 
What a delightful garden this is. I must have a 
pansy border like that in mine. Tell me, Hilda, 
why have you always so persistently and doggedly 
effaced yourself? Why did you never let anybody 
know you, and subside passively into the back- 
ground rdle f I never knew you, I am sure, and if 
it had n’t been for Peter I should n’t have known 
you now. He made me see things very clearly. 
The poor little caryatid cowering in a dark corner, 
and holding up a whole edifice on its shoulders.” 

“ How could he ! Why will he always see things 
so ? It makes me miserable.” 

Well, well ; perhaps Peter’s point of view would 
seem to you exaggerated. But, as I say, why did 
you never let me get a glimpse of you ? ” 

I never tried to hide. Circumstances kept me 
apart. I loved my work.” 

“ Yes ; it must have been charming work, in all 
its branches.” Mary gave her a gravely gay glance. 

269 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


When you did emerge from your shadows, why 
did you never talk — make an effect, like Kathe- 
rine ? ” 

‘‘ Katherine makes effects without trying. She is 
effective, and people like her for herself. I was 
fitted for the dark corner. That is why I stayed 
there.” 

No, my dear, one can’t explain the injustices of 
fortune by that comfortably, or uncomfortably, fatal- 
istic philosophy. Noble natures get oddly jumped 
on in this world,” Mary added reflectively. “ The 
tragedy, of course, lies in being too noble for one’s 
milieu^ for then, not only does one renounce, but 
one is expected to, as a matter of course. Forgive 
me, Hilda, if I am a little coarsely frank. I am 
speaking, for the moment, with gloves off ; I know 
the truth, and you may as well face it. It ’s a pity 
to be too noble; one should have just a spice of 
egotistic rebellion, else one is squashed flat to one’s 
corner.” 

“ Peter found me,” said Hilda, with a sad smile 
that evaded the “ coarse ” frankness. 

They walked silently along the little path under 
the sunlit shade of the fruit-trees. Mary stopped at 
a turning. 

^‘Yes; that is encouraging. Reminds one of 
Emerson and optimism. Peter did find you.” Her 
large clear eyes looked an exhortation into Hilda’s. 
“ Peter found you, my dear child ; let Peter keep 
you, then.” 

'‘He always will keep — what he found,” said 
Hilda, trembling. “ Hove him. I shall always love 
him,” 


270 


HILDA 


“ My dear Hilda ! ” 

“ But I cannot marry him. I cannot.” 

“You are a foolish little Hilda.’' 

“ We made Katherine miserable.” 

“ And therefore all three must be miserable. For 
Peter to have kept faith with Katherine — loving you 
— might have called down a far worse tragedy.” 

Hilda gazed widely at her — 

“ Yes ; I deserve that suspicion.” 

“ Oh, you foolish, foolish child ! ” cried Mary, 
laughing ; and she kissed her. “ Come, come ; say 
that you will be good to my poor brother ? ” 

“ I love him, but I cannot ground my happiness 
on a wrong.” 

“Your happiness would be grounded on a right ; 
the wrong was a mere incidental. Peter must wait, 
I see. Perhaps you will own some day that that 
was ample expiation.” 


271 


CHAPTER XIV 


NE October day Hilda received a queer little 



note from Katherine. That Katherine had 


spent a month in Scotland and was now on a yacht 
with a party of friends, Hilda knew, and the note 
was dated from Amalfi. 

Why don’t you marry Peter, you little goose ? ” 
was all it said. 

Hilda trembled as she read. Katherine’s scorn 
and Katherine’s nobility seemed to breathe from it. 

I am not as base as you think,” was her answer. 

Katherine received this answer in Amalfi. She 
had come in from a walk with Allan Hope along the 
road that runs above the sea between Amalfi and 
Sorrento, and one of the yachting party, a girl who 
much admired Katherine, was waiting for her before 
the hotel holding the letter, an excuse for the excited 
whisper with which she gave it to her. 

‘‘ Dear Miss Archinard, he is here ! ” 

What ‘ he,’ Nelly ? ” asked Katherine ; she 
looked down at the writing on the envelope of her 
letter, and the becoming flush that her walk through 
the warm evening had brought to her cheeks faded 
a little. 

Allan Hope had gone on into the hotel, and 
Nelly’s excited eyes followed him till he was safely 
out of sight. 


272 


HILDA 


Mr. Odd,” she said with dramatic emphasis. 
‘‘ Of course he did n’t know.” 

** Oh, he is here ! ” Katherine’s eyes were still 
on the writing. '' No, of course he did n’t know.” 

“You aren’t afraid of his meeting Allan?” 
Nelly was Allan Hope’s cousin. “ Is there no 
danger. Miss Archinard ? He must be feeling so — 
dreadfully ! ” 

“ What a romantic little pate it is ! I really be- 
lieve you were looking forward to a duel. No, no, 
Nelly, there is nothing of an exciting nature to 
hope for ! ” 

“ But won’t it be terrible for you to meet him ? 
The first* time, you know ! And engaged to Allan ! ” 
said Nelly. 

“ We are not at all afraid of one another. Don’t 
tremble, Nelly.” 

Katherine read her letter standing on the terrace 
before the hotel. The dying evening seemed to 
throb softly in the southern sky, arching solemnly 
to the horizon line. Katherine looked out at the 
sea — it was characteristic of her deeply set eyes to 
look straight out and seldom up. She stood still, 
holding the letter quietly ; Katherine had none of 
the weakness that seeks an outlet for the stress of 
resolution in nervous gesture. She did not even 
walk up and down ; indeed the resolution was made 
and meditation needless. Turning after a moment, 
she went into the hotel and asked at the office 
whether Mr. Odd were to be found. 

“ Yes, he was in his room ; he had only arrived an 
hour ago. 

Katherine requested the man to tell Mr. Odd that 
l8 273 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


Miss Archinard was on the terrace and would like 
to see him. In two minutes Peter was walking out 
to meet her. 

Peter’s eyes, as they shook hands, were rather 
sternly steady ; Katherine’s steady, but more 
humorous. 

“ Sans rancune ? ” she inquired, with some light- 
ness, and then, sparing him the necessity for a reply 
that might be embarrassing for both of them — 

I want to ask you a question ; pardon abrupt- 
ness ; why don’t you marry Hilda? Won’t she? 
There are two questions ! ” 

“ I don’t marry her because she won’t. And 
there is the evident reply, Katherine.” 

“ Do you despair? ” she asked. 

“ I can’t say that. Time may wear out her re- 
sistance.” 

“I know Hilda better than you do — perhaps. 
You see I have got over my jealousy.” Katherine’s 
smile had all its charm. “ She won’t if she said 
she would n’t ; if she has ideals on the subject.” 

Then I must resign myself to hopeless wretched- 
ness.” 

“ No ; you must not. I am going to help you. 
Don’t look so gloomily unimpressed. I am going 
to help you. I am going to do penance, and I don’t 
believe you will consider it an expiation either! 
Just encourage me by a little appreciation of my 
dubious nobility.” Odd looked questioningly at her. 

“ Peter, when I came back that night I was en- 
gaged to Allan Hope.” 

“ Oh !” said Peter. They looked at one another 
through the almost palpable dusk of the evening. 
274 


HILDA 


I ’ll give you the facts — draw your own con- 
clusions. I ’ll give you facts, but don’t ask self- 
abasement put into words. You really have n’t the 
right, have you, Peter?” 

‘*No; I suppose not. No, I haven’t the right.” 

You put yourself in the wrong, you see. You 
must allow me to flaunt that ragged superiority. 
Peter, very soon after our engagement you began 
to dissatisfy me because I realized that I should 
never satisfy you. The more you knew me the 
more you would disapprove, and your nature could 
never understand mine to the extent of pardoning. 
Once I ’d seen that, everything was up. It would n’t 
do ; and the knowledge grew upon me that the im- 
possibility was emphasized by the fact that Hilda 
would do. I saw that you loved her, Peter ; stupid, 
stupid Peter! And poor little Hilda! She was 
ground between two stones, was n’t she? your igno- 
rance and my knowledge. I give you leave to offer 
me up as a burnt sacrifice at her altar, only don’t 
let me hear myself crackling. Yes ; I saw that you 
were in love with her, and that she would be in love 
with you if it could come — as it should have come — 
as I intended it to come — foolish, hasty Peter ! No ; 
no comments, please ! I know everything you can 
say. I took precious good care of myself, no doubt ; 
my generosity was n’t very spontaneous ; perhaps I 
thought you ’d get over it ; perhaps I wanted you to 
get over it ; perhaps even while seeing that Allan 
Hope would do — for I satisfy him most thoroughly 
— I kept a tiny indefinite corner in my motives for 
possible reactions ; I give you leave to draw your 
inferences, but don’t ask me to dot my i’s and cross 
275 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


my t’s too cold-bloodedly. I accepted Allan Hope 
on the understanding that the engagement was to 
be kept secret for a few months. I told Allan that 
you did not love me ; that I did not love you ; that 
our engagement was broken. I told him that when 
I saw his love for me struggling with his loyalty to 
you. It was the truth from my point of view ; but 
from his, from yours, it was a lie — and own that at 
least I am generous in telling you ! Too generous 
perhaps. I came back to Paris to tell you that I 
had discovered it would n’t do, and to make you and 
Hilda happy. And, when I saw you together, both 
as bad as I was — at least I thought so at the time 
— both disloyal — I forgot my own self-scorn ; I felt 
a right to a position I had repudiated. I had to 
be cruel, for, Peter, I was jealous ; I hated her for 
being the one who would satisfy you thoroughly 
and forever.” 

There was silence between them. If she had 
satisfied him as only Hilda could satisfy him, she 
would not have gone to Allan perhaps. Odd with 
a quick throb of sympathy understood the intima- 
tion, understood both her courage and her reticence. 
He had seen her at her noblest, yet there was much 
not touched upon, far from noble. 

The half avowal of a disappointed love flawed her 
loyalty to Allan. Such love deserved disappoint- 
ment and was of a doubtful quality. Peter respected 
her frankness but was not deceived by it. His man- 
liness was touched by the possibility she had hinted 
at. He understood Katherine and he forgave her 
— with reservations. 

There seemed to be nothing to say, and he did 
276 


HILDA 


not seek words. He and Katherine walked slowly 
to the end of the terrace. 

Then Katherine told him of her note to Hilda and 
handed him Hilda’s reply. 

“ I shall go to England to-morrow, Katherine,” 
said Odd, when he had read it. 

“ You will have to fight, you know. She will say 
that my wrong did not excuse hers. She will say 
that nothing excused you. She is a little goose.” 
“ I ’ll fight.” 

They had walked back to the entrance of the 
hotel and here they paused ; there was a fitness in 
farewell. 

“ Katherine,” said Odd, “ it would have been very 
base in you to have kept silence, and yet, in spite of 
that, you have been very courageous this evening.” 

“You are a hideously truthful person, Peter. 
Why put in that damaging clause ? Have I merely 
escaped baseness ? ” 

“ No, for you have never been finer.” 

“ That is true. I ’ll never reach the same heights 
again,” and Katherine laughed. 

“ Understand that / understand. Your story has 
not absolved me'' 

“There is the danger with Hilda. You must 
make my holocaust avail.” 

“ I hope that a good thing is never lost,” Peter 
replied. 

277 


CHAPTER XV 



HE October day was deliciously warm at A1 


J. lersley, a fragrant autumnal warmth, limpid 
with sunshine, and the woods all golden. 

Odd was walking through the woods, the sunshine 
of home and hope in his blood, his mood of reso- 
lute success tempered by no more than just a touch 
of trembling. 

In the distance lay the river, a glitter here and 
there beyond the tree trunks; the little landing- 
wharf where he had first seen Hilda was no doubt 
still unchanged and worth a pilgrimage on some 
later day, but now he must take the most direct way 
to the Priory ; he had only arrived an hour before, 
but a minute’s further delay would be unbearable. 
This day must atone for all the past failure of his 
life, and make his autumn golden. He walked 
quickly, following, he remembered, almost the same 
path among the trees that he and Hilda had gone 
by that night, ten years ago ; the memory empha- 
sized the touch of trembling. To dwell on her dear- 
ness made fear tread closely. The gray stone wall 
wound among the woods, Peter caught sight of it, 
and, at the same moment, of the fluttering white of 
a dress beyond it that made his heart stand still. 

He could not have hoped to find Hilda here with 


278 


HILDA 


no teasing preliminaries, no languid mother or sulky 
father to mar the fine rush of his onslaught. 

Such good luck augured well, for — yes, it was 
Hilda walking slowly among the trees — and at the 
clear sight of her, Peter wondered if the breathing 
space of a conventional preliminary would not have 
been better, and felt that he had exaggerated his 
own courage in picturing that conquering impetu- 
osity. 

She wore no hat, and her head drooped with an 
air of patient sadness. Her hands clasped behind 
her, she walked aimlessly over the falling leaves and 
seemed absently to listen to their rustling crispness 
as her footsteps passed through them. There was 
a black bow in the ruffled bodice, and with her black 
hair she made on the gold and gray a colorless sil- 
houette. 

Odd jumped over the wall, and, as he approached 
her, the rustling leaves under his feet, their falling 
patter from the trees, seemed to fill the air with 
loud whisperings. Hilda turned at this echo of 
her own footfalls, and Odd could almost have smiled 
at the weary unexpectancy of her look transformed 
to a wide gaze of recognition. But his heart was in 
a flame of indignant tenderness, for, all chivalrous 
comprehension conceded, Katherine’s confession 
had been cruelly tardy and Hilda’s face was pitiful. 
She stood silent and motionless looking at him, 
and Odd, as he joined her, said the first words that 
came to his lips. 

** My child ! How ill you look ! ” 

The self-forgetful devotion of his voice, his eyes, 
sent a quiver across her face, but Odd, seeing only 
279 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


its frozen pain, remembered those stabbing words : 
‘‘You are cruel and weak and mean,” which she 
had spoken with just such a look, and any linger- 
ing thought of a fine onslaught was nipped in the 
bud. 

“ I may speak to you ? ” he asked. 

Hilda, for her own part, found it almost impos- 
sible to speak ; she wanted to throw herself on his 
breast and weep away all the gnawing loneliness, all 
the cruel doubts and bitter sense of guilt. The sight 
of him gave her such joy that everything was already 
half forgotten — even Katherine ; even Katherine — 
she realized it and steeled herself to say with cold 
faintness — 

“ Oh, yes ; ” adding, “ you startled me.” 

“ So thin, so pale, such woful eyes ! ” He stood 
staring at her. 

“You — don’t look well either,” she said, still in 
the soft cold voice. 

“ I should be very sorry to look well.” 

Peter was adapting himself to reality ; but if the 
impetuous dream was abandoned, the courage of 
humbler methods was growing, and he could smile 
a little at her. 

“ Hilda, I have a great deal to tell you. Will 
you walk with me for a little while ? It is a lovely 
day for walking. How beautiful the woods are 
looking.” 

“ Beautiful. I walk here a great deal.” She 
looked away from him and into the golden distance. 

“ And you will walk here now with me ? ” he 
asked, adding, as the pale hesitation of her face 
again turned to him, “ Don’t be frightened, dear, I 
280 


HILDA 


am not going to force any solution upon you ; I am 
not going to try to make you think well of me in 
spite of your conscience.” 

Think well of him ! As if, good or bad, he was 
not everything to her, and the rest of the world 
nowhere! Hilda now looked down at the leaves. 

“ And here is Palamon,” said Peter, as that de- 
lightful beast came at a sort of abrupt and plough- 
ing gallop, necessitated by the extreme shortness of 
his crumpled legs, through the heaped and fallen 
foliage. “ He remembers me, too, the dear old boy,” 
and Palamon, whose very absorbed and business- 
like manner gave way to sudden and smiling demon- 
stration, was patted and rubbed cordially in answer 
to his cordial welcome. 

“ It must seem strange to you being here again 
after such a time,” said Odd, when he and Hilda 
turned towards the river, Palamon, with an air of 
happy sympathy, at their heels. The river was in- 
visible, a good half-mile away, and the whispering 
hush of the woods surrounded them. 

** It does n’t seem strange, no,” Hilda replied ; 
“ it seems very peaceful.” 

“ And are you peaceful with it ? ” All the im- 
plied reserves of her tone made Peter wonder, as he 
had often wondered, at the strength of this fragile 
creature ; for, although that conviction of having 
wronged another was accountable for her haggard 
young face, the crushed anguish of her love for him 
was no less apparent in the very aloofness of her 
glance. 

** I feel merely very useless,’’ she said with a 
vague smile. 


281 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“ I have seen Katherine, Hilda.” Odd waited 
during a few moments of silent walking before 
making the announcement, and Hilda stopped short 
and turned wondering eyes on him. 

“It was at Amalfi. She had just received your 
letter, and she sent for me ; she had something to 
say to me.” Hilda kept silence, and Odd added, 
“You knew that she was on a yachting trip?” 
Hilda bowed assent. “ And that Allan Hope is of 
the party ? ” 

“ I heard that ; yes.” 

“ And that he and Katherine are to be married ? ” 

Here Hilda gave a little gasp. 

“ She does n’t love him,” she cried. Odd con- 
sidered her with a disturbed look. 

“ You must n’t say that, you know. I fancy she 
does — love him.” 

“ She did it desperately after you had failed her ; 
after I had robbed her.” 

Odd was too conscious of the possibility of a 
subtle half-truth in this to assert the bold unvar- 
nished whole truth of a negative. 

Hilda’s loyalty lent a dignity to Katherine’s most 
doubtful motives, a dignity that Katherine would 
probably contemplate with surprise, but accept with 
philosophic pleasure. 

Had Hilda indeed robbed her unwittingly ? Had 
he failed her long before her deliberate breach 
of faith? He had, she said, shown his love for 
Hilda, and would she have turned to Lord Allan’s 
more facile contentment had she been sure of 
Peter’s ? 

Delicate problem, without doubt. His mind 
282 


HILDA 


dwelt on its vexatious tragic-comic aspect, while he 
stared almost absently at Hilda. 

Certainly his disloyalty had been unintentional, 
guiltless of plot or falsehood ; and Katherine’s was 
intentional, deceitful, ignoble. It would be possible 
to shock every chord of honor in Hilda with the 
bold announcement that Katherine had been en- 
gaged when she came to Paris, and that her cruel 
triumph had been won under a lying standard. 

And that shock might shatter forever, not the 
sense of personal wrong-doing, but all responsibility 
towards one so base, all that brooding consciousness 
of having spoiled another’s life. Katherine had 
abandoned the position, and poor Hilda had merely 
stumbled on its vacant lie. 

Yet Odd felt that there might be some ignoble 
self-interest in showing the ugly fact with no soften- 
ing circumstances ; circumstances might indeed 
soften the ugliness into a dangerously tragic resem- 
blance to despairing disappointment. Hilda would 
be horribly apt to think more of the circumstances 
than of the fact. Odd was consciously inclined to 
think the fact simply ugly, inclined to believe that 
the irksomeness of his growing disapproval, rather 
than the loss of his love, had led Katherine to seek 
a more amenable substitute ; but with a sense of 
honor so acute as to be hardly honest, Peter put 
aside his own advantageous surmises, and prepared 
to give Katherine’s story from a most delicate 
and selected standpoint. Strict adherence to Kath- 
erine’s words, and yet such artistic chivalry in their 
setting that even Katherine would find her sacrifice 
at Hilda’s altar painless. 

283 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


“You shall have her own words,” he said, after a 
long pause. He felt that the inner trembling had 
grown to a great terror. He became pale before 
the compelling necessity for exaggerated magna- 
nimity. 

To lose his own cause in pleading Katherine’s 
loomed a black probability, yet in his very defeat 
he would prove himself not unworthy of Hilda’s 
love ; neither cruel nor mean nor weak. Ah ! 
piercing words ! At least he could now draw them 
from their rankling. And as they walked together 
he told Katherine’s story, lending to it every chari- 
table possibility with which she herself could not 
honestly have invested it. 

When he had done, taking off his hat, for his 
temples were throbbing with the stress of the recital, 
and looking at Hilda with an almost pitifully boyish 
look, he had emphasized his own unconscious reve- 
lation of his love for Hilda, emphasized that hint of 
broken-hearted generosity in Katherine, he had 
hardly touched on her lie to Allan or on the glaring 
fact that she had made sure of him before giving 
Peter his freedom. The soreness that the revelation 
of Katherine’s selfishness had made between them 
so soon after their engagement, he had not men- 
tioned. 

Hilda walked along, looking steadily down. Once 
or twice during the story she had clutched her 
clasped hands more tightly, and once or twice her 
step had faltered and she had paused as though to 
listen more intently, but the white profile with its 
framing eddies of hair crossed the pale gold back- 
ground, its attitude of intense quiet unchanged. 

284 


HILDA 


The silence that followed his last words seemed 
cruelly long to Odd, but at last she lifted her eyes, 
and meeting the solemn, pitiful, boyish look, her 
own look broke suddenly into passionate sympathy 
and emotion. 

“ Peter,” she said, standing still before him, “she 
did n’t love you.” 

“ I don’t think she did.” Odd’s voice was shaken 
but non-committal. 

“ Perhaps she loved you more than she could love 
any one else,” said Hilda. 

“Yes; perhaps.” 

Hilda’s hands were still clasped behind her, and 
she looked hard into his face as she added with a 
certain stern deliberateness — 

“ I don’t believe she ever loved anybody.” 

Odd was silent. He had not dared to hope for 
such a clear perception. 

“ She was very cruel to me,” said Hilda, after a 
little pause, and her eyes, turning from his, looked 
far away as if following the fading of a lost illusion. 

“ I don’t think she ever cared much for me 
either,” she added. 

“ Not much ; not as you interpret caring.” 

Peter kept the balance with difficulty, for over 
him rushed that indignant realization of Katherine’s 
intrinsic selfishness. 

“ No ; I could not have been so cruel to her, not 
even if she had robbed me of you.” It was the 
most self-assertive speech he had ever heard her utter. 

“ No ; you could not have been so cruel to her,” 
he repeated, “ not even loving me as you did and as 
she did not.” 


285 


THE DULL MISS ARCHINARD 


There was a pause, a pause in which it seemed 
to Odd that the very trees stretched out their 
branches in breathless listening, and Hilda said 
slowly — 

‘‘ But that does n’t make what I did less wrong. 
I was as weak, as disloyal, as though Katherine had 
loved us both as much as I thought she did.” 

“ And I as cruel, as weak, as mean ? ” Odd asked. 

“ Ah, don’t ! ” she said, with a look of pain. 
“You have redeemed yourself,” she added, “and 
have made me more ashamed.” 

“ Then I have made a miserable failure of my at- 
tempt.” 

“ No, no ; you have not.” 

The river was before them now, and the woods 
sloped down to its curving band of silver. They 
both stood still and looked at it, and beyond it at 
the gentle stretches of autumnal hill and meadow. 

“ Dear Peter,” said Hilda gently. He looked 
down at her and she up at him, putting her hand 
in his, but so gravely and quietly that the tender 
little action conveyed nothing but a reminiscence of 
the child of ten years ago. 

So, holding hands, they were both still silent, and 
again they looked at the river, the meadows, and the 
blue distance of the hills. Palamon, after running 
here and there, with rather assumed interest, his 
nose to the ground, came and sat down before them 
with an air of dignified acquiescence and appreci- 
ative contemplation. In the woods the sudden, sad- 
sweet twitter of a bird seemed to embroider the 
silence with unconscious pathos. 

“ O Peter ! ” said Hilda suddenly, on a note as 
286 


HILDA 


impulsive and as inevitable as the bird’s. He 
looked at her and put his arms around her, saying 
nothing. 

‘‘ Oh ! ” said Hilda, “ I cannot help it. I love you 
too much, dear Peter. Everything else may have 
been wrong, but it is right to love you.” 

He took her face between his hands and looked 
at her. 

“ Everything else would be wrong.” 

Then kiss me, Peter.” 

He gave himself the joy of a delicious postpone- 
ment. 

“ Not till you tell me that you see that everything 
else would be wrong.” But the kiss was given 
before her answer. 

“ I trust you, and you must know.” 

THE END. 


287 







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